In my teenage years, I came to realize that angels and demons are actually the same thing, but spiritually polar opposites; it is then our place as mere mortal beasts cursed with divine reason to decide ultimately which side of the pendulum attracts us most.

There’s a moment in adolescence—especially for those of us wired for too much thought and not enough sleep—when binary spiritual symbols stop feeling external and start becoming mirrors. For me, that moment came when I realized that angels and demons weren’t opposing species—they were opposing states of the same being and of the same soul.

That revelation didn’t come with fanfare., just a chilling, creeping sense that no one is born wholly one thing or the other. The divine and the damned are carved from the same material. To me, it’s not that good and evil live in tension—it’s that they live in reflection. The divine is simply the soul made lucid through intention; the demonic, the soul cracked under unacknowledged need. Both require choice. The angel becomes an angel not by default, but by resistance. The demon, not by destiny, but by surrender. We can call this the Pendulum of Duality.

How we talk about angels and demons says more about us than them. We moralize, we metaphorize, we sanitize. We claim one side while harboring seeds of the other. The real danger isn’t in being “tempted” by the wrong side—it’s in believing the battle is ever over. That we’ve already arrived at goodness. Rhetorically, the pendulum image works because it implies motion, not arrival. We are not static beings. We are constantly choosing—and being chosen by—our own patterns.

I’ve never been convinced that angels must glow and demons must rot. Some demons are devastatingly beautiful. Some angels arrive broken and bleeding. The aesthetic of each is layered, fluid, not confined to Renaissance paintings or neon-drenched horror tropes. Their energy is tone, not costume. There’s poetry in the paradox.

In society, we’re taught to name the angel, fear the demon—but the systems around us reward selfishness, ego, and destruction masked as ambition. It’s culturally safer to chase the power of demons than the humility of angels. Thus, we live in a societal system that favors Angels in theory, but Demons in practice, even if we’re taught that it’s supposed to be the other way round.

Critically, then, we must ask: What incentivizes demonic behavior? Who profits when we give in? And what does resistance cost us?

The spiritual war is not waged in heaven or hell—it’s in the unremarkable choices we make when no one’s watching. Whether we soothe or scald. Whether we forgive or flinch. Whether we show up as guardians or saboteurs. Angels and demons aren’t out there. They’re in here.