‘WE CREATE OUT OWN MONSTERS’ by Johnathan Crane #monsters #dramaticmonologue #actingmonologue

[0:00]You ever notice how people talk about monsters, like they just appear? Like they crawl out of the dark, fully formed, teeth bad, ready to ruin lives. Like evil just wakes up one morning and decides to exist. Well, that's a comforting story. Why it lets everyone off the hook. But monsters aren't born. They're assembled, piece by piece, word by word, silence by silence. You take a kid, just a kid, and you tell them they're nothing long enough, and they start to believe it. You've shown them that kindness is weakness, trust gets you hurt, love is something that disappears the second you need it most, and what do you think happens? You think they just stay soft, stay hopeful? No. They adapt. They build armor where their skin used to be. They sharpen their instincts into weapons. They learn how to survive in a world that only ever taught them how to endure pain. And then one day, when they stop asking for permission to exist, you look at them and say, oh, what happened to you? Like you weren't there for every step of the transformation. Oh, we love to point fingers at the final product, call them broken, dangerous, too far gone. But nobody wants to rewind the tape. Nobody wants to sit with the uncomfortable truth that maybe, just maybe, the monster is the group project. You ignore them. You dismiss them. You hurt them. You left them to figure it out alone, and when they did, when they became something unrecognizable just to survive, you decided they were the problem. But here's the thing about monsters. They don't forget who made them. And they don't stay hidden forever.