When I was a little girl I believed in monsters that lived under the bed. The type of creature that was imaginary, large, ugly and plain frightening. A creature that was selfish, powerful and full of hatred. However, no matter how many nightmares I had about monsters or creatures, I was always told the same thing, that they don’t exist. Being told that did nothing to shake my beliefs especially given the fact that whenever I slept the vision that met my eyes was of a dark figure lurking and watching me as though it were waiting to eat me alive. But as I grew up I stopped having nightmares of a creature under my bed, yet I would still dream of a monster.

After the nightmares of a monster under the bed, the monsters I believed in started being people I knew. I think that the shift of the monsters I believe in happened when I was five years old. It was around this time that I had woken up in the night to the tears of my mother as she cried over the phone after being told that my father wanted a divorce. At this moment in my life, I witnessed my own mother who I viewed as my hero being broken by someone. The idea of it to me at the time was unexplainable, all I knew was my dad was making my mom cry and it made him a bad person. To me during this time a bad person meant they were a monster.

Several years after this I started being bullied at school. There was a girl who went out of her way to make me feel wrong no matter what I did, to make me doubt my friends and to change things about myself. It got to the point where I stopped almost everything that I loved, and I was only seven years old. If I’m being honest, at seven I didn’t know a lot about bullies, all I knew was she was being really mean and that monsters were mean, so that's what she was. Everything seemed so black and white, she wasn’t nice so she wasn’t a friend and the only thing left for me to label her as was a monster.

The next time that I used the term monster after using it on my dad and this girl was many years later when I was in grade seven. Between me being seven and entering grade seven, I did have many difficulties and problems in my life, but I never thought of monsters. I remembered the incidences, but it now seemed so childish.

Therefore when my grade seven teachers asked us to write about if we believed monsters existed, I wasn’t sure what to write. Did I say yes and use my childish examples, or say no? What I ended up doing was researching events in the news and reading about people in the world. Then I started researching about hate crimes, murder, rape and how many inequalities there was in the world and it suddenly seemed as though I could answer my teachers' questions. Yes, monsters exist as there is no other word for people who have committed heinous crimes. People who harmed others and seemed to be so full of evil, people who are part of supremacy groups, people who refuse to grant people basic human right are living and breathing monsters.

Then not even two years later I had another shift in what I believed monsters to be. While still stood by the idea that people can be monsters, I started thinking that thoughts are monsters. Dictionaries have different definitions of a monster, some say its something terrifying and others say it’s a threatening force. So when somebody's own thought seem threatening and terrifying, doesn’t that fit the definition? Even though it’s not its own being, thoughts can still be scary, cause pain and be cruel so that makes them a monster sometimes.

What these instances have shown me in life is that monsters do exist, and while they may not be creatures, hiding under my bed, they are living people who cause pain, they are people who are full of evil and they are myself as my thoughts are monsters running wild inside of me.