Monday, May 30, 2011

The ugly side of humanity...

There is something wrong with me. A serious condition that there is no cure for that I know of. It’s eating me alive, and I am powerless to stop it. While no doctor can ever give me a diagnosis for this, and there is no medicine or treatments that I can have for it, it is just as deadly as any other medical condition. In fact, not only is it a disease, but it’s a sin. Not just any sin however, it’s one of the seven deadly sins. See I have a bad case of jealousy.

Jealousy, envy, resentfulness, all of these words apply to my condition. (And while their definitions might not technically be the same I am going to use the three interchangeably in this post.) See these three things have a grip on my life, and it terrifies me. I have always been a little bit of a jealous person, but it usually only applied to when someone could perform a task better than I could, in which case I would just work harder and use that jealousy as a driving force to better myself. I did that often in school, I took someone being better than me as a slight on myself, and I would get really jealous of someone that was better than me, which is probably one of the reasons I was fairly successful at whatever I wanted to do in school. But not that jealousy is spilling over into other facets of my life, like into relationships with friends. No longer am I only jealous of a person who is able to beat me at something but I am jealous of people that have things I want, I am becoming envious.

My jealousy was not that big of a deal to me honestly; I just thought of it as a competitive spirit and left it alone. However, now that it has morphed itself into envy I am scared of it. I often times find this envy as the driving force behind me doing things. It’s becoming where I do things just to satisfy that envy and not because I want to. It’s turning me into a really bad person, and a terrible friend. For instance, I have this friend who is in a relationship that is going really well for them. I on the other hand am not in a relationship, but I want to be. Instead of being happy for my friend, I am so envious and jealous that I sometimes try to undermine their happiness. I throw sarcastic remarks at them all the time, and threaten our friendship just because they have something going well for them that I don’t. This envy and jealousy is ugly, but my life is beginning to revolve around the ugly side of me.

This past weekend I spent time at the lake with my family. While at the lake I encountered a man that had his own demons that he was fighting. Well actually he wasn’t fighting them anymore, he had succumbed to them. He was an alcoholic. One morning we were cooking breakfast at about 8:00 and we spotted him walking around with a beer in his hand. At 8:00! Later on in the weekend we were all sitting around and we began to talk to him and ask him some questions about his drinking. We asked him when the last time that he stopped drinking was, and he honestly had no idea. So then we asked him what he did when he was at work, and he told us that he drank on the way to work, during his lunch break, and then on the way home from work. Tell me, what kind of a life is that? Without his alcohol he can’t function anymore. His life revolves around the ugly side of him.

For me it’s jealousy. For the man I saw while camping, it is alcoholism. For some its vanity, drug abuse, self confidence issues, or maybe just general hatefulness, but we all have something that wants to grab control of our lives. I have made a conscious decision in the past few days to work on my jealousy issue so that I can make that ugly side of me go dormant and not show itself. I pray that all of you reading this will take the initiative to work on your own problem like I have, and not let it control you like the man I saw while camping. None of us are perfect and none of us ever will be, and honestly that is what makes life beautiful, but there is such a fine in between the beauty of imperfections and the ugliness of that imperfection seizing control of your life. Let’s all work on our problems together, talk to a friend if you need to, but let’s stop them where that are. Let’s make a vow to each other to never let them control us, and then we can all live in the beauty of imperfection rather than on the ugly side of humanity…

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