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

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1. 0:00You ever notice how people talk about
2. 0:02monsters like they just
3. 0:04appear.
4. 0:06Like they crawl out of the dark, fully
5. 0:08formed, teeth bared, ready to ruin
6. 0:11lives. Like evil just wakes up one
7. 0:14morning and decides to exist.
8. 0:19Well, that's a comforting story.
9. 0:21All right, let's everyone off the hook.
10. 0:25But monsters
11. 0:27aren't born.
12. 0:29They're assembled
13. 0:32piece by piece,
14. 0:34word by word,
15. 0:37silence by silence.
16. 0:40You take a kid, just a kid,
17. 0:43and you tell them they're nothing long
18. 0:45enough, and they start to believe it.
19. 0:48You show them that kindness is weakness,
20. 0:50trust gets you hurt, love is something
21. 0:53that disappears the second you need it
22. 0:54most, and what do you think happens?
23. 0:57You think they just stay soft?
24. 1:00Stay hopeful?
25. 1:03No,
26. 1:04they adapt.
27. 1:06They build armor where their skin used
28. 1:08to be.
29. 1:09They sharpen their instincts into
30. 1:11weapons. They learn how to survive in a
31. 1:13world that only ever taught them how to
32. 1:15endure pain. And then one day, when they
33. 1:18stop asking for permission to exist, you
34. 1:20look at them and say,
35. 1:22"Oh, what happened to you?"
36. 1:26Like you weren't there for every step of
37. 1:29the transformation.
38. 1:31Oh, we love to point fingers at the
39. 1:33final product, call them broken,
40. 1:35dangerous, too far gone.
41. 1:39But nobody wants to rewind the tape.
42. 1:41Nobody wants to sit with the
43. 1:42uncomfortable truth that maybe, just
44. 1:45maybe,
45. 1:47the monster
46. 1:49is the group project.
47. 1:53You ignored them.
48. 1:55You
49. 1:56dismissed them.
50. 1:58You hurt them.
51. 2:00You left them to figure it out alone.
52. 2:02And when they did,
53. 2:04when they became something
54. 2:05unrecognizable just to survive,
55. 2:09you decided they
56. 2:12were the problem.
57. 2:16But here's the thing about monsters.
58. 2:20They don't forget who made them.
59. 2:24And they
60. 2:25don't stay hidden
61. 2:28forever.