Naming your monsters.

Don’t show your monsters and don’t explain them. Some creators in the horror genre live by those rules. Well, yeah, at some point in the movie you have to show something, but initially it makes sense to generate tension. Remember how scary the original Alien installment was, before you even saw the mother of all space monsters.

So, next time in the boardroom, extrapolate the opposite of the no-show, no-explain theory onto the horror movie of your job: expose that one person, or maybe those few turning your life a living nightmare.

Show your monsters, name them, and explain them. Write about them. Raise a glass of wine to them. Instead of saying, “my job is a nightmare”… well, say it if you want to, it’s your choice. But instead of only regurgitating that, how about: my monster is a 45-year-old man named Jacob. Stop sugarcoating him. Stop pretending the bad parts are quirks. Let yourself name the cruelty, the arrogance, the small daily poison he drips. “He wears glasses, he’s slightly balding, he’s quite overweight, but body-shames his crew. Jacob is a hypocrite. Oh, and he’s also been through tough times. You’re mentally revealing your knowledge of his tragedy. He lost someone early on in his life, maybe he never got over that.”

This is the mundane shit you internalize, describing the monster the way you see him. You won’t push your own venom into words that might be heard or read. You’re not posting this on social media. If all of this pushes your experience of the dude towards some empathy, diluting your fear, maybe that’s also OK. Start naming the monster exactly for who he is, for who they are. That’s what you do. And you explain them.

Say, Jacob has been in middle management here for years. Maybe he’s just as caught up as I am, equally frustrated and flailing. Incompetent maybe, but not evil. Explaining the mundane reframes the scary scenes within your job, pushing the work environment from a horror to a place where you might see a path away from monsters.

And yes, it will sting. Facing the truth about them, about yourself, is nasty. No comfort blankets here. It probably won’t remove all the horror, or all of the disasters. But it will certainly take away some of the jump scares.

And if you’re brave enough to strip the mask all the way off, you’ll see the monster was always human, and that’s the most terrifying thing of all.