The Slayer – She’s You and She’s Me, She’s Everyone
Many years ago I started to ask why some people went through tragic events and became emotionally stronger, while others became weaker. I started to look at times in my life where I felt strong, and the times of darkness when I was weak. Why in the workplace and in life, there are people who consistently give and others that continually take. I started to ask why there were times where I would sabotage my own efforts and other times when I achieved feats that surprised me.
I am an observer of human behaviour and emotion. Working in roles for 20 years that included human resources, organisational development, leadership and management ensures that you have many opportunities to witness the best, and the worst of human behaviour. I was curious about why some people allowed the worst of their qualities to surface and remain in place. I wanted to understand where behaviours came from and figure out why people’s behaviour varied in different situations. I wanted to discover if this observation was actually true. My curiosity about the human mind and actions led me to many areas of study. Studying human relationships, Legal frameworks, ethics, culture diversity, management, leadership, human behaviour and the human mind in many and varied ways for the past 20 years has lead me to various beliefs. Many of which I continue to test daily.
About 3 years ago I set myself a challenge to read one book per week that explored these subjects and more. This literary adventure has taken me into the minds of some of the world’s leading experts on humanity in all its glory and destruction. I’ve studied many of the great, and not so great, leaders in history to find the lessons that they are teaching. Some of these people I refer to throughout this story, however many more have influenced my knowledge on the subject that I haven’t highlighted.
Taking from the lessons of these greats, the questions and curiosity that comes from researching human behaviour and thinking, academic studies and hypothesis, and my own personal experiences and experiments (both personally and professionally) has led me to a number of core beliefs.
Belief 1: We are imperfectly perfect and completely incomplete.
Belief 2: We are able to hold two opposing concepts as true, at the same time.
Belief 3: Everyone has the ability and capacity to be the best of humanity, and the worst.
These 3 beliefs are core to the system on which I have created.
Let me explore why these three beliefs are important to the story I want to share with you.
There are three parts to you. Three personalities if you like. Three selves. These selves can work together and they work apart.
I call these three selves the human, the vampire and the slayer. I’ll get to why later.
The human is the most commonly experienced and expressed. The human is vulnerable and scared, and also optimistic and content. The human tries and fails, and feels emotion and pain from disappointment. The human manages day-to-day life through experience, love, compassion, skill, trial and error, worry and fun. The human is that part of you that you see most mornings in the mirror. The yawning one. The one that says ‘ok world here I come’. The human is always doing their best. The human loves. The human is perfectly imperfect and completely incomplete. The human is fallible and can be influenced by the ugly parts of life.
The second part is the vampire. The vampire lies waiting in all of us. It’s a creature that finds its way to the surface when the fallible human allows it to happen, or when an experience the human encounters causes a crack to appear in the human’s psyche.
These cracks are formed slowly over time. It may be an unkind word from a parent, followed by incidents of bullying through school, and a boyfriend that isn’t nice to you. The crack may start to show on the human as cynicism or weight gain/loss, or anger, depression or sadness or apathy. Once the cracks appear the vampire can seep through and take hold.
The vampire is a very cunning creature. It finds the small cracks and works hard to widen them. The vampire distracts the human from their purpose because it knows that purpose is the antidote to the vampire’s toxin. It knows that the vampire cannot easily sway a human with a strong and compelling purpose. The vampire is relentless though, it wants to win, and so it finds the cracks and vulnerabilities in the human. It widens these cracks with things like eating too much or too little, emotional outbursts, sadness, critical thoughts, drugs, alcohol, smoking, buying things you don’t need, or anything else in excess. The reason it does this is because while you are distracted from your purpose, it can start to take over. It brings darkness to your life.
You may have had a period in your life that you look back on, and think, “That wasn’t me. That’s not how I want people to know me. I can’t believe I acted that way.” That is the vampire taking hold. Without the third self the vampire can become stronger than the human.
If the cracks started to appear from a very young age, or something tragic happened that creates large cracks, or an illness takes hold of the body or mind, then this may leave a gap large enough for the vampire to take over. We’ve all met people who have allowed the vampire to get strong enough to rule them. The toxin inside of them starts to exit their human and infect the people around. Without a strong slayer the vampire will cause pain for you and others.
When the vampire consumes the human you will see them emerge as a destructive force that causes damage to others through aggressive, arrogant, and malicious behaviour.
More often though, the vampire consumes the human and devours them from the inside. This affects others deeply as they see their colleague, friend, or family members remove themselves from life. These internal vampires are the most harmful because they are not as obvious as the aggressive ones. The vampire hides the human away, so that the help that is needed can’t get close.
When these large escape gaps appear for the vampire, they also leave enough room for the slayer to emerge. You just have to know how she does her work, and welcome her into your life. This is a challenge because if the vampire is strong it will fight to keep the slayer small and inside. Sometimes things get worse before they get better as the slayer and vampire go to war.
The slayer is the strength, the fierceness, the courage, the light, the tough one, and the hard decision maker. The slayer is the part of you that pulls you back into life when things seem grim and the vampire wants to take hold. The slayer is the inner wisdom that comes to you in the middle of the night when you were searching for an answer. She is the quiet voice of reason that speaks to you when your friends and family are leading you somewhere you don’t want to head. She is the intuition that tells you not to head down that dark alley, or get in the car with that boy. She is the one that will kick you in the ass, when you need an ass kicking. She is your protector, your champion, and your warrior. She is a part of you.
To live a life full of love, wisdom, and purpose. A life that is creative, fun, and full of meaning. One that provides love, compassion, and joy to you and others around you. You must have a strong slayer.
The lessons in the book will help you to strengthen your slayer, which in turn weakens your vampire. You will have the knowledge, skills and tools to fight off the vampire when it emerges. The job of the slayer is to protect your human so your human can get on with the job of living your best life.
If you are ready to start your journey towards becoming a slayer, then start by reading her story in The Slayer Codex Vol1: Unleash the Slayer Within