MonsterMind: Dealing With Anxiety & Self-Doubt

Alfonso Casas’s MonsterMind is a very personal account of the inner monsters that live inside his head.

But, who doesn’t have a monster inside them?

Who has never heard that voice inside their head undermining everything they do? You’re not good enough . . . You just got really lucky . . . There are people far better and more qualified than you . . .

In a very honest exercise, Alfonso Casas identifies and introduces his own monsters to his readers: Mr. Past Traumas, Mr. Fear, Mr. Social Anxiety, Mr. Impostor Syndrome, Mr. Sadness, Mr. Doubt... The pessimistic, the insecure, the self-demanding, the monster that keeps you from sleeping while you think of what you could have said back in that conversation two years ago, or that keeps you looking over the punctuation of every text message to figure out the tone lurking beneath the surface. All those monsters make up the bestiary of contemporary society.

But the anxiety generation is expert in more things: in looking inside themselves and their lives, and––why not?––in laughing at their own neuroses as best they can. In the end, if the monsters won’t leave us, we might as well get to know them and laugh at them!

Anxiety is another pandemic, but the monsters dwelling inside us are funny, too (especially as drawn by Alfonso Casas).