When I was young and for a very long time, I thought I could make a difference in this world, and I am sure I did but not to the extent that my young idealism thought possible. I discovered for the most part it is risky to help someone too much or they see you as prey and act accordingly. And so I would limit my help, and grew to understand the wise old saying that god helps those who help themselves.
When I was very young, and for a long time, I believed truth mattered: in families, in the court room, with relationships, in business. I naively believed that honesty was the best policy. Then I realized that truth is an asset to be used sparingly and to be used against someone. Plausible deniability is how most humans manipulate facts to get want they want. Those who walk in honor are usually slaughtered by those who play the game of personal power, and not truth or what is right.
When I was very young, and for a very long time, I thought family was important until I realized that family is just made up of average human beings who will take advantage of your generosity, energy, skills, time, and kindness, and then toss you under the bus, and will use truth as an asset to use sparingly when in their best interest, while hurting another.
When I was very young, and for a very long time, I thought people could be better then they were. Sometimes people can be good, sometimes they can be evil and most of the time they are in negotiation mode for their best interest regardless of what is right. They smile and some even have manners. But still, behind their smiles and sometimes pleasant ways, the truth will usually be acted upon through a filter of their needs only, usually using truth as an asset to use sparingly to get what they want while hurting another.
There were three times in my life that I needed help. Three times that I reached out and said I am scared, this is overwhelming, please be there for me, promise to stay and help me get through this. All three times they smiled, said that they loved me and would do anything for me. So there I was hanging over a cliff with only my fingers holding on to the edge of the abyss and as they walked toward me with a smile, as I thought they were going to lower a hand to help me up, instead they used their foot, while wearing leaded boots, and stepped on my fingers, smashing them till the blood came and I could physically hold on no longer. Some call this betrayal; some call it meanness or cruelty. Some just call it emotional murder. And yet these people smile. They think they are good people, and they probably are good people, on some levels, some of the time, who also, in their selfishness, are quite capable choosing the act of emotionally killing another human being who might have asked for help at a very vulnerable time in their lives.
So now that I am not so very young any more, I still help people but not so much as I know how humans really are. I am older now so I don’t have too much value to people. There isn’t too many ways that others can take from me as I now have little to give. So this older sixty-year-old smiles remembering the bright, smiling innocent, idealistic sixteen-year- old and wonders how life would have been different had the sixteen-year-old knew what the sixty-year-old did.
As you honestly ponder your life, who have you emotionally murdered, yet rationalized the emotional murder to be something else? Humans are good at rationalizing their most atrocious behavior and actions. Some people are colder than others. Some humans have difficulty seeing any situation except through their own perspective. Some humans are emotionally harder than others, or more emotionally unbalanced making the emotional murders sometimes ever-so-easy for them. I am not talking about a broken heart from a romantic break-up, although I wouldn’t want to minimize their pain whiling they heal. I think if you are honest with yourself, within the privacy of your own conscious, you know exactly what an emotional murder looks like. So again, who have you emotionally murdered? How did you rationalize the action? What happened to the person you murdered emotionally?