Jealousy In Beowulf

A person’s mind can be a monster that’s never seen but always heard. A physical monster like Grendel or the Dragon are easier to conquer than an entity that only yourself can hear. Everyone hears about jealousy, anxiety, and self-doubt but no one understands the reasons behind those emotions. I could not tell someone my own reasons for my jealousy, anxiety, or self-doubt which makes the salad bowl full of emotions more jumbled and confusing. The thing about emotions is that if they are all jumbled I cannot conquer them if I cannot identify the monster. These invisible monsters control my life and stay buried just enough that they are impossible to identify and conquer. My jealousy, anxiety, and self-doubt stem from my fear of disappointing people and fear that my modern day Beowulf will not enough to

conquer these monsters who are fighting for their lives.
Jealousy is the big green monster that everyone ignores until it sprints through your veins waiting for you to explode with anger. As a child jealousy is created over simple objects, such as colorful toys and snazzy new clothes. However, as I get older, jealousy gets suppressed almost to the point of extinction. Making jealousy an endangered monster is not defeating the monster rather a tactic to not be labeled as a jealous girl. Now this monster is trying to crawl its way back up to first place in my emotions. My jealousy comes from knowing that I have worked hard for something but someone else ends up with the prize. Life is not always fair and jealousy feeds on that. Now that I am in highschool, jealousy focuses on more important things. For example, I get jealous over the kids who do not get jealous. Not having jealousy as demon in my is a goal I am in constant competition to achieve, so when someone else does not have this struggle in their life, it makes me want to be more like them. However, I hide my emotions well and I wonder if people think I do not battle with jealousy. I have slowly overcome jealousy by remembering wishing to be someone else does not solve problems but creates depression. People most often do not show their emotions so getting jealous over someone else is pointless because you never know their own battle story.
Anxiety is the biggest monster I face as its claws are always wedged into my brain. Anxiety is with me as I wake up in the morning not knowing what the day will bring. The “not-knowing” of the world is what creates my anxiety. I have struggled with forms of anxiety my whole life and have not learned how to control it but rather conceal it. Concealment is not defeating the monster but just a tactic I use to suppress it enough where I can make it through the day without a break down. Actually fighting this monster could be the death of me. When I fight emotions, there is no guarantee I will be the one to come out alive. Therefore, concealment is a happy medium for the demon and myself. Another source of my anxiety is

disappointing others. Life is a competition and survives around survival of the fittest. If I am not the fittest then logically I will die. However, there are many routes in life I can take to survive life but if I choose the wrong path I could be murdered. The idea of not being enough for society and the people I love will always keep feeding anxiety and bringing it back to the surface. There are over seven billion people in this world and there is nothing about me that will make me stand out. All of highschool I have done the best I can with the hardest classes I could possibly take to get recognition and be different from my peers. Recognition is what everyone wants including anxiety. If I am not recognized am I actually succeeding in life. However, there is no template for success and no trophy at the end that everyone gets. Success has to be achieved in my own eyes but I do not know what my success looks like yet and therefore I do not know how to work towards the finish line that I cannot see. Fear of failure is the blackness that keeps adding to anxiety’s dark hole, making it less and less easy to see an escape.
Self-doubt is the source of anxiety and jealousy.

Without self-doubt, anxiety and jealousy would have no place in my emotions. There is a general saying that “confidence is key” which rains true because if I had confidence that who I am was enough, then there would be no reason to create anxiety over being a failure or look at other people with jealous thoughts. I have searched but there is not a clear destination from where my self-doubt has originated, which makes its destruction more difficult. Not knowing the origin of this monster raises the question of nature vs. nurture. Was this monster created because of events that happened in my life or was I just born this way? Beowulf was born with his strength that created his courage to slay monsters but events in his life, for example, slaying Gendel, increased his courage. This logic also applies to how my self-doubt was probably caused. I was born with a little bit of doubt but over time events discouraged me and I fell deeper into the whole of self-wollow. Self-doubt can cause more emotions than jealousy and anxiety. Maybe conquering the one big monster will slowly collapse the rest of the pyramid

below.
Not all monsters are green with scales and claws. The monsters to look out for are the ones you cannot see. These invisible monsters are the scariest because they can only be conquered by me and if I am not my modern day Beowulf then I will have to live with these monsters for the rest of my life. These monsters are just a pigment of my imagination and not all will be real but it will take a Beowulf size of courage to conquer all demons in my life.