Do Not Look Upon The Face Of The Gorgon

Christmas officially ended for us on New Year's Day...all the exterior lights came down (with some help from the neighbors!) and were dried out in some unexpected sunshine before being tucked away in various bins until next year.  All in all it was a glorious day and capped off a fantastic week of visiting with family and friends.  Saying goodbye to Christmas can sometimes be a gloomy proposition as it signals that long slog through January that welcomes the grey dreariness that is usually February around these parts.  March is a wild card, and as Prince once sang, sometimes it snows in April....we'll see how the rest of this winter plays out....

So, another year come and gone...goals and resolutions left over from last year are resurrected for this year.  As I wrote in an earlier post, I'm not making resolutions, just living my life via a certain theme of less is more...which brings me to the following...

Every day we are surrounded by vampires.  Not the classic Bela Lugosi/Christopher Lee type, or the flamboyant dressing like Adam Ant vampire Lestat type, or even the sparkly Twilight type...I'm talking emotional vampires, the ones that feed on bitterness, hate, revenge, and malice.  Their hunger to dwell in past slights, real or imagined, is insatiable, and the more souls they can drag into the muck and mire of their lives, the more energy they gain.  These vampires are evil, they are cruel, and they are hopelessly unaware of the role they played in emotionally shackling themselves to an ebony boulder of mindless hate.

The fact that the emotional vampire is too dimwitted to realize that they are the cause of everything wrong in their lives means that reasoning with these entities is pointless.  Attempting to reason or engage with them in a logical and rational manner just begins a new cycle of pain and hurt for you while fanning their stupid inner fire of blind rage.       

How do you slay this particular vampire, this vile worm that slithers amongst us, that preys on our emotions and attempts to lure us into taking the bait attached to their barbed and nasty words?  You don't.  'But that's impossible!', you say. Is it impossible, or just very, very, very difficult?

Keep in mind that the agony these individuals are in is entirely self-inflicted, but rather than look inward to resolve their deep-seeded issues these beings choose to lash out...to project their shortcomings onto others...to drain your emotional energy to revitalize themselves.  The only option you have is to starve this beast, do not give them an ounce of your emotional energy or time.  Freeze them out of your lives and your thoughts because engagement only leads to more of your emotional destruction.  For your sake and for the quality of your own life leave them buried in the emotional graves they dug themselves or deep within tombs they sealed with their own deeds.

The above isn't easy, I've wrangled with emotional vampires and fallen for their tricks on more occasions than I would like to admit.  However, you will never be able to concentrate on yourself, your life, your family, if you are dealing with these individuals.  Move forward, don't waste your breath, your time, or your precious emotional energy on them.  Don't get even, don't seek revenge, don't even wish or think about either of those actions...the more time and emotional energy you spend hashing out revenge plots or wishing ill will on them is less time you have for you and yours.  Don't think about evil people.  Don't talk to evil people.  Don't engage on any level with evil people that wish to bring you down to their level.
 
So, back to my theme of 'less is more' for 2013...I want to spend less time dealing with emotionally evil human leeches, which will lead to more time doing what is truly important.  Remember, fighting a pig results in you getting filthy and the pig getting happy...don't fight pigs...and don't ever look upon the face of the gorgon.  In both instances, you lose.