Mining Shadows

Anduhad the Demon

The girl is nearly mine.

She is surrounded by love, but that love is blind. The naive fools raising her are convinced hard work and determination work the same for everyone. They can’t see the signs in their precious little darling because they’ve ignored them in their own pitiful lives.

But I’ve always been here.

Whispering in her ear.

“That’s not good enough.”

“You’re not good enough.”

“Do it right, or don’t do it at all.”

The worthless little knave couldn’t even finish a worksheet in Kindergarten.

Always writing and erasing, writing and erasing. Wearing holes in the paper before she could even move on from the simple task of writing her own name. Every pencil missing its eraser, long before it was sharpened to a knub.

Like a helpless little rodent trapped in the quicksand of unattainable perfection. Every move pulling her further into its suffocating grip.

Ha! I remember when they bought her a big pink eraser. “Problem solved!” they exclaimed.

But that was just the first in a long and endless line of things that would go missing.

“DON’T. LOSE. THIS. ONE.” they ordered as they handed her a replacement. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

What a sumptuous treat it was to watch the look on her face as she unzipped her pencil case and saw no eraser. A feast of panic and confusion, followed by the most decadent of desserts, defeat.

The best part of working on a young one is experiencing the firsts. I’m not sure anything can compare to the intoxicating feeling I got when she got her first B. It wasn’t even on her report card. Just some stupid little spelling quiz.

She doesn’t remember much about that moment…not the teacher…not her age…

But she’ll never forget the pit that grew in her stomach when she saw that letter. A silent but ferocious panic that she kept inside until eventually it felt like a part of her.

Each time she told them about another thing gone missing or a grade that wasn’t an A, it was the same response. “If you’d just put things where they belong, you wouldn’t lose them,” or “There’s absolutely NO reason for you to get anything other than an A.”

That wasn’t true, of course. There was me. But they refused to see.

For years, she put up a decent fight, summoning the hard work and determination her family promised were the only tools she needed. She used every ounce of energy to force that chaotic little squirrel brain to focus—to study, to practice, to achieve, to succeed. Somehow, she got A’s on her report cards and took piano concertos to state competitions. The clever brat even got an ACT score good enough to get her college paid for.

But all of this took its toll, draining her energy and growing the pit in her stomach into a painful, gnawing ulcer.

She’s weaker than she’s been in years, and I think I finally found the thing that will break her. Something to knock her back down and remind her of the defective mess she has always been.

I found a boy who specializes in control. He mastered the art of deception early, hiding behind characters and stories he created to protect his sensitive little sissy heart. After years of living alone, I think he’s finally bored enough to try and play the role of husband. The girl only survived the high expectations of her family because they actually cared about her, but this one isn’t capable of caring about others. He’ll have fun acting like he does, until he’s bored once again. And by that time, she’ll have made herself so small she won’t survive the cage she helped him build around her.

The girl will surely be mine.

Welcome to Mining Shadows

If you’re still reading, welcome! My name is Brit, and I’m “the girl” from Anduhad the Demon. I wrote this story to help me process some of my experiences growing up with undiagnosed ADHD.

In spite of being raised in the Evangelical church, I don’t believe in literal demons, but when my symptoms were at their worst, it often felt like someone or something nefarious was playing tricks on me. I can’t decide if it’s more or less scary that it was just my own damn brain.

If you have ADHD or love someone who has it, you understand the toll it can take, especially when it goes undiagnosed. Just like the girl in the story, I spent my life in an unending cycle of trying and failing to manage my symptoms, internalizing every failure and disappointment until I had a constant stomach ache and no energy left for anything else. I did not receive my diagnosis until two years ago, at age 38.

On top of all of this, from the age of 6, I was perpetually afraid that I or someone I loved would spend an eternity in hell, because there was no concrete way to know that someone was truly saved, and many of my family members had either committed adultery or didn’t go to church regularly, and OH MY GOD, HOW DO I KNOW IF I’M REALLY SAVED?!

If you happen to be in the bullseye of my target audience, you have probably already guessed that in addition to having ADHD, I also grew up living with undiagnosed queerness (ba dum, tsssssss). When you can’t trust your own brain (I swear to the god I no longer believe in I put that eraser in my pencil bag) or your own heart (the heart is deceitful above all things), it’s easy to hide your identity in the closet, even from yourself.

The good news is, after decades of estrangement from myself, I eventually learned to recognize my own voice. I am not officially out to my family (in fact, I’m estranged from some), but I have built a life I love with my partner, and we live as authentically as we can in a red state that some call the buckle of the Bible Belt.

I am now in school to finish the degree I never got on my first attempt, pursuing a B.S. in Professional Writing, and I have fallen in love (for the umpteenth time) with writing. I’ve been keeping any creative writing to myself for years, but recently, I’ve been inspired by the indie authors that show up on my Threads and TikTok For You pages who are writing inclusive stories and finding their audiences outside of the traditional channels.

If you enjoyed any part of this post, I hope you’ll come back for more. I plan to use this blog partially to hold myself accountable and build the discipline and skills needed to fulfill my long-term goal of publishing a queer horror novel. My other objective for this space is to provide horror-adjacent, queer-inclusive content for folks who know what its like to live in the shadows. If you’ve ever longed to be a ghost (being perceived is its own horror, amiright?) or had trouble seeing your own reflection, you are welcome here.