Jack Pelham

She never learned to manage her own emotions, as adults are capable of doing. She never learned to regulate her feelings or to cope with disappointment. She never learned that she can craft her own emotional life somewhat, and develop successful strategies for managing her own happiness.

Instead, she just figured early on in life that she’d get it from somebody else.

She developed a habit of feeding off of the emotional energy of others. And she began to experiment with the thoughts and emotions of others, to see if she could get them to act and to say the things that suited her own emotions the best. And she learned to manipulate them, and to capitalize on whatever were their own cognitive and emotional weaknesses.

And it was fun. It gave her something to do. And if she caused them pain, she didn’t have to feel it herself—not too much, anyway. And if they got mad at her, she could just walk away. Or better yet, she could try to invent ways to make them apologize, and to take the blame for her sins on themselves.

And this is the life she made for herself, living through surrogates, best she could manage—playing out her life as if by remote control in the hearts and minds of other people. She was something like a parasite. Something like a virus. Something like a cat toying with its prey. Something like a vampire. But whatever she was, she wasn’t normal. She wasn’t mentally healthy. She wasn’t sane.

And she hurt many people, making their lives a living hell—all because she would not grow up herself. Whether from fear or stubbornness or some other dysfunction, she simply wouldn’t grow up.

And as it happens, she was born to parents who didn’t have much good sense about raising a child to maturity. They thought kids were supposed to be kids, until they just weren’t anymore. They had no idea that the process of maturation is to begin and birth, and that it can be deliberately facilitated by good parents.

And her school was not run by keen educators, but by government. And their goal was mostly just to run her through the system. And her church had no particular interest in the maturation of its members.

So, now she is grown, and as emotionally immature as a toddler in many ways, but with the body, intellect, and means of an adult. She is miserable within her own soul, and a menace to society. And she counts what is wrong with her as the fault of other people, whom she resents for not doing better to keep her emotional void filled up.

And this all makes me wonder about myself, and how much I might feed off of the emotions of other people from time to time. And if I do, I sure hope that I fill them back up, so they’re at least as good as when I found them—if not better—and certainly not drained from the experience of being around me. And I think I had better take a good look to find out for sure, so that I can change my behavior as needed.

The behaviors that now get one labeled as a “narcissist”
Bear a striking resemblance to those for which
Certain toddlers used to earn efficacious spankings.

What a pitiful thing—
That good conviction
Spouted from the lips of a fool—
Defiled by association,
And less likely than before
To be pondered fairly
By those competing fools
Who do not happen
To hold it already.

She dutifully admits to error,
But assumes it to be
Much smaller in scope
Than it is.

And while she has an inkling of this,
She cannot bring herself
To see it
As an error in its own right—
As equally in need
Of admission
As the first.

The one man,
Faced with the prospect of an existing God,
Cannot help himself
But to cast off
In a voyage of the imagination,
As if to decide by fiat
What this God must be like.

It is a make-believe love,
In which he pretends
That pretending to love
Is the actual essence
Of loving itself.

Start it now!

He is undone
In his argument
But too blind to see it.

He has lost touch with this reality
Even as he pounds away at others—
His affect screaming
That reality matters
And that if they know what’s good for them,
They had all better give heed to it.

And this moment is a tragedy
And a shame for him,
Whether he sees it or not.

And the stopwatch is ticking
As the Universe measures the span
From now until he yields himself
To the obvious.

Let us carefully choose
From among these
Myriad gems of virtue
But a few tokens—
That we might hollow them out
To a mere shell of what they were,
So as to more easily carry them about
Wherever we go,
As a signal to all that
We hold virtue to be
Of the highest importance.

Not all weirdness comes from messed-up church doctrine, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any messed-up church doctrine that doesn’t lead eventually to some sort of weird behavior, however large or small it may be.

There is in many an assumption
That conversion to Christ
Is but a short process,
Involving little more
Than the adoption
Of a new axiom or two,
Such as that Jesus is Lord—
Or in the case of the particularly eager,
Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior!