Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
What if the parts of ourselves we call demons are not always enemies, but voices we have never learned how to understand?Conversations with My Demons, Book I: The Journey Begins opens the first five gates of an intensely personal journey through memory, difference, knowledge, authority, and responsibility.Years ago, while incarcerated, JohnMichael Price began writing the earliest version of this story by hand. Returning to those pages years later, now with the perspective of higher education, psychological study, and experiences he could not have imagined when he first put pen to paper, he found himself asking different questions.What if he could sit across the table from the forces that shaped his life and speak to them directly?The result is neither a traditional memoir nor a clinical textbook. Instead, Price transforms diagnoses, wounds, adaptations, and internal struggles into characters capable of answering back.The journey begins with Trauma, a haggard visitor who challenges the distinction between a wound and what caused it. Beyond him wait ADHD and Autism, two unlikely companions who question whether difference must always mean defect. At the Gate of Knowledge, the brothers Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and Dyscalculia confront the relationship between difficulty, intelligence, education, and worth. Oppositional Defiant Disorder takes the conversation into authority, resistance, and the unsettling possibility that automatic rebellion can become another form of control. Finally, Conduct Disorder asks the hardest question yet: once we understand what shaped our behavior, what responsibility remains for what we actually did?Their conversations move across psychology, philosophy, religion, mythology, and esoteric symbolism. Christianity encounters Buddhism. Taoism challenges the urge to force transformation. Stoicism confronts what can and cannot be controlled. Greek and Egyptian mythology, Freemasonry, alchemy, Hermetic thought, and other traditions provide different languages for questions humanity has wrestled with for centuries.Who am I? Why do I suffer? What is mine to change? What do I owe others? When does resistance become captivity? Can understanding the cause of harmful behavior coexist with accountability for its consequences?Price does not pretend these traditions all teach the same thing, nor does he offer his journey as a prescription for anyone else’s. The conversations belong to him. The questions, however, may feel strangely familiar.And something else is happening.A mysterious cloaked figure called Rejection keeps appearing where he does not belong.Visitors know things they should not know. Certain phrases pass from one room to another. Feathers accumulate after each encounter. The demons sometimes speak as though they have met before, even when they shouldn’t have.Someone, or something, seems to be listening.By the time Price reaches the fifth gate, the question is no longer simply whether his demons have been enemies, protectors, teachers, wounds, or adaptations.A deeper mystery has begun to emerge:Who, or what, has really been speaking to him all along?Conversations with My Demons, Book I: The Journey Begins is the opening volume of a three-book journey through the forces that shaped one man’s understanding of himself. It is a story about confronting the names we are given, questioning the meanings we attach to them, and discovering that understanding ourselves may require something more difficult than defeating our demons.It may require sitting down and listening to them.
