Keep Your Parasitic Infections To Yourself, Steven
AKA stop stealing people's innocence in an attempt to be seen, heard, or self-gratified.
It’s beautiful when I explain something terrible you cannot understand.
It is beautiful because it means you still have your innocence. And it would be wrong of me to steal that away from you, the way people have stolen mine.
Becoming a true witness to the darkest parts of life is like a parasitic infection that goes beyond the mind. It’s highly contagious if you don’t keep tabs on your thoughts, words, and actions.
Generational trauma is a generational parasite. Working its way into the heart and mind, it rots you from the inside.
And they show up in many forms.
I named my brain parasite “Shelly,” and lab tests show heavy mold from my last relationship (they don’t call them toxic for no reason).
I also picked up a chronic inner ear infection that likes to wake me up at night.
Once you’re infected with one, you’re more susceptible to others. The people most infected can see you a mile away. Parasite-driven predators, you’re their favorite prey.
Prevention is always worth more than the cure.
Even if the wound closes, it brings scars with it.
How wonderful to be as oblivious to real life as Emma Watson.
I think I was 7 or 8 years old when I started shaving my legs. Full of confidence and ignorant to all risk, I peeled up a thick layer of skin covering my Achilles tendon with the pink plastic disposable razor’s edge.
I still cringe in extreme caution when shaving that part of my leg. Every single time. And I get ready to pass out when watching other people casually speed-shave their own legs.
The first time I watched a PG-13 romance scene in a movie, my stomach did flips and butterflies. Nothing real or fictional is arousing to me now, what a let down.
Those are a few my own mild “parasites” and I’m not out there cutting other people’s legs with a razor, or blunting them to pornographic materials (imagine how fucked up it would be if that was my life’s mission).
Years ago I would get sick very easily. 5-6 times a year I’d have some kind of flu, followed immediately by bacterial Bronchitis that required antibiotics to clear. This went on for about a decade, non-stop.
One day, I was at the gym and a friend approached me, “hey, how are you?” I asked.
“Ah, I’m sick as a dog. Feel awful! Here to sweat it out, ya know?”
WTF.
I literally got up and ran away from him.
This bring-my-sickness-to-a-public-place-to-sweat-it-out mindset isn’t specific to gym bros (or the gym in general). It’s how most people operate in all capacities. They’re full of “parasites” of the mind or heart or soul, and seek out other people to spread them to.
Yesterday, I wrote about a conflict I’d been feeling around wanting the bad things in my life to mean something vs. locking them down forever as if they never happened (i.e. not sharing them publicly in any way).
I’m realizing that conflict is actually a question, “is there a way to share them without spreading more “parasites” into the world?” Can I share the lessons learned, without stealing people’s innocence along the way? I’m not trying to be a thief in this life.
I don’t need you to feel the same degree of hurt as I have in order to feel good, and heard, and seen. Hell, I don’t really need to be fully heard or seen by anybody else but me.
What do you think?