Yesterday I shared a short paragraph I had written awhile ago about poison or more specifically about a poisonous person. And I’ve been thinking on it ever since. Why is it that there are times when I know, absolutely without a doubt that something or some person is bad for me and yet I’ll still be drawn to them? I know I’m not the only one to do this, and some make an entire life out of the pursuit of such things. Is it the need to test ourselves? What about when someone is so very toxic and yet you can’t seem to pull yourself away from them until you are nearly choking or drowning on your own emotions or fear?

It has been a long time since I’ve put myself or allowed myself to be apart of a relationship like that. But what about the things I do to myself? I understand that I can’t expect perfection from myself or others. I learned that a long time ago. So, in accepting imperfection have I gone too far and accepted mediocrity? Sometimes it feels that way, and I know there is no one to blame but myself. It feels like I’m rambling a bit, so I’ll get to my quandry. I can avoid poisonous people and situations with a good amount of success. How do I go about avoiding or curbing self-induced toxins?

A whole lot of questions and not too many answers, except that when I’m busy I don’t ever have time to think about such things. Maybe keeping busy is the answer, or maybe it is another way to ignore a problem. Again, not too many answers today.

I was tromping through some of my files when I came across a short paragraph that I wrote awhile ago. I think it might have been for a character I played on a MUD (multi-user dungeon), but I’m not really sure because after a second look it could be something that I threw down about the verbal abuse that was inflicted on me while growing up. So, basically I’m recycling old stuff for here (yep yep lazy lazy).

As you exhale the poison floats as if on a current, curling past your lips, billowing outward, and saturating the air. It is now the very air surrounding me. I breath in your gaseous venom like a first inhale after near suffocation. My body demands a need for it, though the bells in my head are clanging with danger. It dazes my mind, numbs it with intoxication. There’s no resistance now; your poison has its desired effect on me, controlling me just as you intended.

P.S. We saw Evanescence in concert Monday night with Cold and Revis (and Cauterize, but we missed them), and it was a great show even with all the kinks they were working out since it was the first night of the tour.

There are hurdles or obstacles on the path that leads to one’s desires. As a child, one might have had to clean up a backyard, or put away toys a number of times before the prized new toy could be earned. As an adult, one might have to study, be tested and work for hours before the big raise was given that afforded the shiny new sports car. These are consumer driven examples of desire, and there is always more to life than that whether we recognize it or not.

There are the desires for love and acceptance. The hurdles here may be different for each person, but they still exist. Can a person exercise, clothe and drape themselves in the perfect persona to find love and acceptance? My answer is no, but I’m sure it works for someone out there. Can the love and acceptance be found by changing the cast of players around you? Perhaps, but maybe only in conjunction with finding one’s truest self to be.

I worry most for people who have had the hurdles removed from their path. There are parents and guardians of the privileged that equate pampered, hurdle-free life with a better and safer life. But really it seems more like clipping a canary’s wings and setting it loose in a field of hungry housecats. People without coping skills don’t know they’re impaired until it is too late. And even then they may not figure it out since surely they walked into some alternate reality and don’t the rest of us know who they are!?

But back to hurdles. For those of us leading unsheltered lives (some more than I others, I realize, because even I had some sheltering) we see the hurdles, and we have to judge for ourselves if the leaping around is worth the effort. Or maybe some of us are fond of leaping around and the prize at the end of it all is just superfluous. Whose to say? What I know is that I feel much better when I’m hopping around trying to get somewhere than when I’m sitting on the ground watching everyone else bound by me. Raise those hurdles. I’ll just find some flubber in a dark, dank corner around here somewhere.