“I’m great,” I suddenly realized, “I’m a really great guy…” Then I got to thinking. “Why the hell have I been taking so much shit off people all these years when I’m so great? Why have I been letting people push me around and make me feel bad about myself, like I’m not as good as everyone else?”

Then I realized that I wasn’t just great, I was awesome. I was better than all of them. They weren’t on the same page as me. They weren’t in the same class as me. They were like inconsequential insects, crawling around the place trying to make out that they were so great. Because deep down they knew that they weren’t. Full of the awareness of my own awesome superiority, I laughed. I laughed scornfully, thinking of all the useless fuckwits who had delighted in making fun of me and belittling me for all these years. Those useless worthless assholes. How dare they look down on me, as if they were so great. They don’t know shit! They don’t know a damn thing. To think that all my life I have taken so much crap from all these people who were actually fast asleep, lost in the coma of social conditioning and who didn’t on this account have the authority to tell me anything seemed hilarious to me. What a complete joke it all was!

Then I remembered my headmaster and how often I had been browbeaten by him, made to feel stupid by him, made to feel inadequate by him, and my mood changed. I couldn’t help remembering all the various people in my life who had humiliated me, belittled me, mocked and derided me and in the blink of an eye I was full of anger, full of scalding rage. “Those lousy shitheads,” I raged, “Those dirty hypocritical bad-minded scumbags.” Now that I thought about it I could see that I had been subjected to a systematic process whereby I had been made to feel that it was me who was the useless fuckwit when actually that hadn’t been the case at all. It had been them all along! They had been the fuckwits not me. I had gotten all of the blame. They had turned it around on me and got me to feel bad instead of them…

As the true enormity of the injustice that had been perpetrated upon me became clear it was as if someone had crept up behind me and punched me full-force in the kidneys. It was a physical shock. I went from being merely enraged to something else entirely. Before I had been red in the face and hot under the collar and now I was stone cold. It was as if all the blood had suddenly been drained from my face – I had gone so far beyond fury that it wasn’t funny. Beyond fury into what, you may ask? What are we talking about here? I don’t have the words for it. Looking back on it, I can only assume that I had fallen into some kind of catatonic state. I had withdrawn deep into myself, locked up in an icy subterranean cave. Locked up in ice-cold capsule of pure hate. Gone far beyond any form of communication.

I don’t know how long I was like that. A long time, anyway. When I came out of it I was a pale shadow of my former self. I was a ghost. I was fear-filled and furtive. I was full of self-doubt and self-recrimination. I was haunted with feelings that I had somehow done wrong, feelings that I was somehow responsible for bad things. I was weighed down by a crushing sense of my own unworthiness. I felt that I was a bad person, a wicked person. I felt that I deserved to be punished. I knew now that it had always been me – I knew that it had all been down to me, no one else. I was to blame, only me. It had been me all along.

There was darkness all around me – I wore it like a cloak. There was badness in my heart. I was the Dark One, the source of all malignancy. Strange shadowy misshapen creatures gathered around me, frolicking in the gloom. They were my children. They were my own thought-forms brought to life by the terrible intensity of the darkness that was in me. Only it wasn’t true life of course but an unholy mockery of life, a satanic parody of life.

These shadowy creatures gambolled and frolicked, and they gambolled and frolicked. And all the while the darkness around me multiplied and grew denser, multiplied and grew denser. Over and over again. Monsters were born out of that darkness and they gave rise to monsters that were in turn yet more monstrous than they were. Demons found entrance and spawned demon-children. All manner of unholy creature flourished and made merry. Worlds of unutterable unimaginable malignancy came into being and passed away again. Evil empires rose and fell, rose and fell, time and time again, each a hundred times darker and more sinister than the previous one…

This went on for some time. Then all of a sudden there was a shift – the darkness ebbed away and I started to feel that I was great again…