Coming out of the woods

When identifying supernatural creatures in your day-to-day existence, it's only fair to identify your own as well.

It took six years to ID my boss. Identification was progressive and exponential.

Before the search, peculiar behaviors beckoned. It became necessary to scutinze these to learn their lexicon, and categorize them into some organizing principle, an archetype. 

Psychology is an excellent resource; albeit a mere launching pad. Mythology helped pare down the data into a single, all encompassing concept.

It would have taken a lot longer without the Internet and Netflix, perhaps 40 years. Think Bob Cratchit hunched achingly over the ledgers, chilled to the bone, nose running persistently, longing for a "good day to you, sir" like a dog waiting for a table scrap.

Mr. Cratchit might have escaped such an ascetic existence sooner if he had had Google and a better healthcare option for his son. But then, he would have left before the fat lady sang; before Scrooge found redemption, which permitted Cratchit to continue his excellent attitude of humble servitude, instead of becoming warped by grief and bitterness into a monster himself.

Monster comes from the Latin term "monstrum," a portent or sign, similar to "montrer," French, to show. So, seeking signs to interpret the portent, I spied, at first, an overly zealous ego. She would actually clap for herself and exclaim gleefully, "Yay, me!" with completion of a seemingly mundane task. Then, the atypical egoist evolved into a narcissist that turned into a dark triad of personality traits, and, finally, a Wendigo.

Imagine my surprise with the realization that I had been coexisting with an insatiable cannibal (not of flesh, but a hunter and consumer of human spirit). Unfortunately, my little field trip took a u-turn, flat out spoiling my delusional scenarios of victim hood.

How I was able to survive for so long in proximity to such a formidable beast? I must either be soulless myself and/or be in possession of supernatural attributes as well.

I had been performing a simultaneous search for suitable symbiotes in this context. "If this is you, what does that make me?"

A reverse narcissist, Echo to Narcissus; co-dependent; sycophant; weeping Myrtle, a ghost, a poltergeist, a ... La Llorona, the weeping woman who drowned her children (dreams) to spite her philandering husband, doomed to forever seek her sacrificial lambs? Not pretty or even close to any imagined end game.

So I must work to emerge from this cocoon, which means altering and or, more likely, terminating its context, my personal dynamic with a Wendigo.