There are a lot of things in life that upset me. Generally, this is because I am uber-quick to jump to the defense of any injustice I happen to notice. I am passionate about so many things that I spend too much time laughing or crying and not enough time simply living in between. Rarely do I get upset about the things in my own life, because, being my father's daughter, I am so guilt driven that it hurts. I can look past a lot of things people do and deal with it, because in the grand scheme of things, if I don't come out missing an important appendage I think I'm probably ahead.
However.
Having lived an amazingly long (read: looooooooooooooooong) part of my life on a rather short leash, I've come to a place where leashes don't feel so good and collars aren't my gig. Well. We're speaking metaphorically. This just isn't the time to talk about those collars.
Having been a person that rolled over and closed my eyes and tried (oh how I tried) to ignore the emotional terrorism that was flung towards me on a daily basis ... and being the person that amazing and finally woke up one day and realized that I was tired of being Closet Kelly ... I refuse to at any point again in my life let someone walk in and bulldoze down all the work I have done in the past few years.
So here is what I have to say about this ... my take on emotional terrorism. It took me a long time to realize these things, because I grew up in it and sometimes it's just not easy to see the forest when you're running into all those damn trees.
It takes a certain emotional immaturity, a degree of shallowness, to care so much about your own needs that you can't see anyone elses. I have to wonder what their childhood was like, who it was that hurt them, that made these relationship nazi's the way that they are. But then, that's how I operate, that's how I think -- worried about the wounds they have suffered instead of angered over the hurt they inflict (I just proved an important point, did you get it?). It saddens me to know how weak they are, to know that they honestly cannot see past their primal needs to be concerned about the people around them. This is a lifestyle, a way of living that will eventually drive all the people that might otherwise have been there for them, away.
And lonely is a difficult way to live.
But I realized something else, also. The me's in this world, the people that ooh and ahh over every little mental scratch and scrape that the people we love encounter -- we feed this disease. Instead of letting them work it out themselves we try to cover up all their woes and be a salve for every heartache they face. We hide the ugly words behind our backs, smoothing over the wrinkles and telling them that eventually it will all be okay. And when they come at us with anger and scare tactics and the years of communication warfare they have learned -- we freeze, not wanting to be responsible for any harm they bring themselves or anyone else.
And therein lies the problem, and amazingly, the answer. We aren't responsible. Just as I can't make my kids like the bully that treats all their classmates so poorly in school, I can't make the bully realize what they are doing. And I can't make the bully apologize, and if everyone stops paying attention to the bully, I can't stop the bully from crying.
We all have to cry, sometime. We all have to take responsibility for our own emotions and the way we deal with them. Just as I decided two summers ago that I'd rather live a life than live a coma. But that was my decision. That was the beginning of my realization that there was an entire forest to navigate, if only I would stop running into the same tree.
But my, those trees are big, aren't they? And they do hurt. I just have to wonder how the world would change if instead of running around with a trail of blood behind us, we all started carrying our own first aid kits. And what if we stopped blaming the trees and started actually watching where we were going.
Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James (1842 - 1910)
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