If You Can't Take the Heat

We're supposed to teach children to not touch a hot burner. It's so bright and inviting that a child's instinct is to want to touch it. No matter how much we tell them not to, how much it will hurt, their little hand wants to reach out and feel for themselves. If the child does this, if he or she gets one millisecond of the heat that comes from the burner, they will see for themselves that we weren't being militant adults, we were just trying to help them from getting hurt. When really though the thing that made them learn was getting burned. You can see where this is going.

I have a friend who dates inappropriate people. By inappropriate I mean horribly selfish, self-absorbed, narcissistic man whores. She wears her heart on her sleeve and gives any walking Joe a chance to take it and mash it up in his hands, which usually he does. She dated one guy in particular that we would fight about because I knew what kind of person he really was. He was a person that would play mind games, tell her things she wanted to hear but never followed through, made her feel inadequate, desperate and unworthy when in reality she was amazing, beautiful and of course could do so much better than him. Every time she let him back in and I had to listen to her complain about him letting her down it fueled the fire of our fights.

Years later, not that long ago though, I finally got it. I called her up and said I get it, what you were doing. She had to see for herself. She had to see if she was going to get burned. It didn't matter what I said, because half of the time she knew I was right, she just wanted to prove me wrong. She wanted to prove that the person that we fought so much about really was her Jake Ryan and I was a judgmental fool for thinking otherwise. But it wasn't my decision to make, wasn't my life it was affecting, no matter how hard I tried to make it that way.

I let my concern for her overpower what she was indirectly trying to tell me. She didn't care. At the time, she didn't care she was getting burned. Only she could decide when enough was enough and for me to fight with her and lecture her, it was only making it look that much more inviting. Why do we eat fast food if we know it's full of fat and cholesterol that will clog our arteries? Why do people smoke? Why do people do things that are bad for them when everyone around them is telling them not to? Because until they get burned, it seems like a good idea at the time.

People set different limits for themselves and are ultimately going to do exactly what they want no matter what anyone says. And for the most part, this is a very good way to live life. You listen to too many people and you forget how to make your own decisions, learn from your mistakes, find out what really makes you happy. We want something to show for our scars. Guess we have to remember that you have to go ahead and touch the burner to know just how good it feels when you take your hand away.