We often meet people with a sense of helplessness or down on their luck. We may always have wished we could do something for them but there’s only so much we can spare sometimes.
We are having trouble keeping up with life on our own, so no help is realistically expandable in most of our cases. I recently started to think about this as I was dealing with just such an acquaintance in dire straits; her misery did not start today, I knew for myself. She did not just dropped out of the sky totally destitute. Her Children did not suddenly come out of the blue requiring food, money and other things without preamble. I was looking at a snapshot of a much longer reel and was wondering how I could fix it in an equally brief second decision. The fact is, no such a decision can be made and a lifetime of error upon error cannot be erased or washed away in an instant. The thing to do is to be strong and say to oneself, I can only help he who genuinely wishes to be helped. This person more than likely has had opportunities that they elected to ignore by choosing the easy way out or the fun way out.
There are plenty of people very worthy of our help if we can afford it but I am referring to those eternal “needers” that constantly have to be fed either money or attention at the very least; I call some of those “black holes” as they suck energy from any room and will pull you into their inescapable misery before you realize it.
We all have them in our lives and we all have suffered at their hands. How is it that in one quick second they can make their problems ours? By that I mean us, the others, the givers and not the takers. It seems we may have a conscience that would like to find solutions to everyone’s problems and as such, the minute we hear of a dilemma, we make it our own and try to find it a denouement. These black holes have a great radar to locate kind hearted folks out there, and once those are found they’ll feed off of them like a deadly fungus.
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….Every other family has a “black hole” with a cloud over his or her head and no luck ever in their future….
I thought for a while that this was a trait existed in our society only and that only our relatives and friends had the knack for finding our weaknesses in order to get us, to pour out our sympathies along with our Dollars.
It turns out that the same plague exists here and everywhere else. Every other family has a “black hole” with a cloud over his or her head and no luck ever in their future. Said “hole” is the eternal victim of society at large and is very much a misunderstood genius. The more you attempt to clean up their future the more they bring up the past?
As traumatic as this scenario is, the solution could not be simpler; the best line I learned from my friend was; “learn to say get the hell out of here” he said. He had suffered the same “friendly fire” from his very own sister and came to realize that nothing was ever going to change the situation.
Upon a long reflection and consideration of his wisdom, I felt totally rejuvenated and refreshed. He was right, sometimes it is simply not worth having such a relationship. A relationship should NOT be a one way street.
Having said that i was reminded of a story “” by Vinitha D’Souza on this column few months ago. To all of you who are agonizing over such a decision to sever ties with a supposed loved one, I just wanted you to know you are not alone and you do have support. Take this from me, you’ll live happily ever after!
Author: Jeevan Pinto- USA
