Boo!

There comes a time in every properly made horror film where the unsuspecting, vulnerable female (and sometimes male) protagonist peers into the bathroom mirror after a hot steamy shower, wipes off the residue, and finds that their own reflection is joined by a bogeyman, a psycho-slasher with all manner of detrimental weaponry, or a cyclops monster that spews out green viscous goo, each time it hears its victim's cries or screams.  Lately, while I have not been impaled on a bed of nails by the shadowy characters that live beneath the stairs, I have found that each time I wipe away the fog directly in front of me, I too, am joined by another in a series of scary cretins whose spikes are not necessarily in full-view initially.  In fact, the spikes come subtly, almost passively out of the miasma, and I find that I need to keep swatting the terrors, in an effort to stay the course and survive this most daunting of circumstances; instead of "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," I would say that no work makes Jill frustrated and sad.  Jill/Me/I am trying to wade through the murky state of things, with sea monsters jutting in and out of every corner, and my paddle is splintering, and I need new siding on my canoe. Each time I wipe the mirror, I have to reacquaint myself with myself.  Am I here?  Am I vanishing?  Am I the woman I once was, or continue to be?  Is this a lesson in metaphysics? And then, somewhere in this murk, and nightmarish nebula, a familiar and kind voice, and a familiar and kind face will reassure me.  It emanates from the very bottom of my being, it says: "keep going, keep chugging, keep plugging, after all you're Ms. Pacman, and you can gobble up all the silly obstacles set in your path."  Yes, I seem to be taken in by this silly statement from the bottom of my being, it's valid, it's useful, it's available to me.  It keeps me from looking over my shoulder, under the bed, and tensing up after a bath.  I'm eating dots, avoiding ghosts, reversing the course of the maze, all the while, garnering a lot of fruit bonuses that will be consumed for increasing point values later in life.