Conversations with My Demons

Conversations with My Demons, Book I: The Journey Begins is a literary, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual exploration of the forces that shape identity, behavior, suffering, and self-understanding. JohnMichael Price began writing the earliest version of this journey by hand while incarcerated. Years later, after returning to higher education and studying psychology, human development, religion, philosophy, and the traditions that had long fascinated him, he returned to those pages with a different vocabulary—and different questions. What would happen if the parts of ourselves we call demons were given a chair and allowed to speak? Across five symbolic gates, Price sits face-to-face with personified figures drawn from his own experiences: Trauma; Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder; the three brothers Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and Dyscalculia; Oppositional Defiant Disorder; and Conduct Disorder. Each encounter challenges assumptions he has carried about wounds, difference, intelligence, authority, rebellion, accountability, and responsibility. But these are not clinical case studies, nor are the demons simply diagnoses to be defeated. Their conversations move through psychology, Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism, Greek and Egyptian mythology, Freemasonry, Hermetic and esoteric symbolism, and other traditions as Price searches for connections without pretending that different systems are identical. As the conversations deepen, another presence begins appearing at the edges of the journey. A mysterious figure called Rejection moves through the rooms. Feathers accumulate. Visitors know things they should not know. Certain words and expressions recur in voices that should have nothing in common. And gradually, another question emerges: Who—or what—has really been speaking to him? The Journey Begins is the first book in the Conversations with My Demons series, an introspective journey through memory, difference, knowledge, authority, and responsibility toward questions whose answers may lie beyond the demons themselves.