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I am lying on my mother’s bed. She is beside me. I turn my head and watch as her belly rises and falls with her breaths. Her dark curly hair is spread on the pillow, her hand perched on her wide hip as she lies on her side. She is looking at me. She has a mother’s smile: soft and rosy. But that will change. Her pink lips are thin, her mouth small with one front tooth crossing over the other. It makes her upper lip look puffier than it really is. When she smiles, her brown eyes are warm, her cheeks turn the colour of blush roses. I love her smile. I hold on to it. I don’t know when it will fall again

There is a book resting between us. It has a black cover with gold and silver inlay. Its pages are onion paper, and I love the sound they make as she turns them. This book is a precious item; one of the most expensive in our tiny house. There is no title on the cover, just an image of a door bordered with dwarvish runes, something called the Evenstar in the centre. The spine says The Lord of the Rings, and I don’t know who J.R.R. Tolkien is, but my mother seems to know him really well.

She is reading to me. This place is comforting, it’s safe, even though I know in my small as-yet uncomplicated mind that she needs this more than I do.

The story is about small people called hobbits, a ring, and a wizard. The language is hard for me to understand, but her voice is soft, and she is so happy. I want to hold on to this. Maybe she will make a latticework of her fingers and keep us here forever. The outside world is scary—scarier than orcs or a black tower capped by an eye wreathed in flames. The monsters outside my house, the ones in the schoolyard, they look just like those who aren’t monsters.

Those monsters have regular faces and they smile like I want to, but if I look closely, their smiles always make my skin cold. My mother tells me that they will be mean to me, and when they are, I know she’s right.

“But you, my ducky, are a special little girl. That’s why they try to hurt you.”

“Be careful. The world is a cruel place.”

“There is no one to protect you but me.”

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I’m not sure I’ll ever stop grieving when I think about that cocoon my mother and I created together. She told me stories about magic, but she also told me stories about evil men who leer at little girls. She told me stories about how her father once held her mother’s head under water in the kitchen sink, and how her mother twisted away and gathered her up, and together they escaped. She told me about the darkness in the corners of her bedroom and a cousin or uncle, I don’t recall, who rubbed his parts on her. I can’t really remember friends coming to the house in those early years. I wonder if she feels bad about that, my not having friends. Perhaps she, too, was lonely. She had me, though. I was her friend. I didn’t mind.

Grief doesn’t necessarily mean someone has died. It can exist in the absence of anything tangible. Perhaps a longing for what was, or what could have been. Or holding that grief for a loved one when they are unable to grieve on their own.

It can, if left unattended, become something else. It can grow its own skin, create lungs and fingers, a heart with a beat that keeps rhythm with the ache in one’s own chest. Grief can come alive and carry its own agency. And sometimes, just sometimes, that grief becomes a monste

I feel this a lot. This same grief will probably sit with me for the rest of my life. It’s a grief for what never was, for a stability that I didn’t have in my childhood, youth, and well into my adult years. It’s grieving what was lost while I was living with undiagnosed mental illness and treating myself abusively. I grieve for the possibilities that will never come to be: the sense of life accomplishment, of being able to look back on my youth with fondness, and not living with the shame of my past. I always feel like I’m trailing behind, a latecomer to adult-hood, because I never experienced much of a childhood.

But back when I was a little kid, before I could even acknowledge and comprehend what I was feeling, the only emotion I knew how to express was anger. And, over the years, that anger became my weapon. It became my monster. And everyone, including me, thought this monster and I were one and the same.

Excerpted from The Monster and the Mirror: Mental Illness, Magic, and the Stories We Tell, by K.J. Aiello. ©2024 Published by ECW Press.

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Learn more about The Monster and the Mirror:

Revelatory memoir and cultural criticism that connects popular fantasy and our perceptions of mental illness to offer an empathetic path to compassionate care

Growing up, K.J. Aiello was fascinated by magical stories of dragons, wizards, and fantasy, where monsters were not what they seemed and anything was possible. These books and films were both a balm and an escape, a safe space where Aiello’s struggle with mental illness transformed from a burden into a strength that could win battles and vanquish villains.

A unique blend of memoir, research, and cultural criticism, The Monster and the Mirror charts Aiello’s life as they try to understand their own mental illness using The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and other stories as both guides to heroism and agency and cautionary tales of how mental illness is easily stereotyped as bad and violent. Aiello questions who is allowed to be “mad” versus “sane,” “good” versus “evil,” and “weak” versus “strong,” and who is allowed to tell their own stories. The Monster and the Mirror explores our perceptions of mental illness in a way that is challenging and tender, empathetic and knowledgeable, and offers a path to deeper understanding and compassionate care.