I guess there are things in this life I'm not meant to understand.
There are days when I look at the people that surrond me, and I look at the gifts they have been handed throughout the course of their lives, and I honestly, people, really and truly, look at these guys and gals, and look at the mess they've made of their lives, and the opportunities they have missed, and the damage they have done to themselves, and to their relatives, and to their friends, and I really and truly have to wonder how on earth people who share the same physical structure, the same basic chemical makeup can turn out to be so diverse on emotional and cognitive levels.
Culturally speaking, there is an enormous amount of historical literature that exists about the pitfalls of "chasing the dragon" and of those famous and maligned opium dens (it's not as romantic as it sounds. They were in the slums. People smoked, got high, died. You could smoke next to a rotting corpse.). You might think it's something you can walk away from; most people do. I'm sure that the wife who is responsible for the loss of the the family farm because she discovered and became addicted to internet gambling (took out a mortgage on the farm without telling her husband, gambled and lost all the funds) thought the same thing. The alcoholic I wrote about (from Creative Loafing) a few weeks ago? He just knew he could walk away from alcohol whenever he wanted.
And maybe some folks can.
But not you.
And you never will be able to. This is an all or nothing situation for you, and the fact that you fail to recognize that means that you have no grasp of your own reality at all. What does it take? What's it like to be an adult and to call your parents from the pokey? What's it like to be an adult and to have to ask your friends and family time and time again to bail you out of trouble because you are too incompetent to take care of yourself? Wait, I forgot, it's not too incompetent, it's TOO HIGH.
You can't be fired from your family for failing to perform as a child. You can't be fired for failing to love, respect and honor your siblings, or to cherish and respect and value your parents. You can't be fired as a child for abusing the trust of your family, for lying to them, for misleading them about your whereabouts, your financial situation, what you do in your spare time; in short you can't be fired for being a bad child. You are still their child, and no matter how much you may try people's patience, you are still a member of the family and still have the family's love.
But you have to stop; life is not one gigantic therapy session where you sit on a comfy chair in the therapists office and lie your way into some great land of prescription shangri-la. You have a problem, and you need to deal with it. No one can make you love yourself, and god only knows no amount of medication, legal or otherwise, is ever going to dull the pain of that self hatred.
I'm afraid that some people slip beyond help. That no amount of love and affection and intervention will ever be enough to reach people because they don't want to be reached.
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