Let's Talk: Burning Alive

I think that I'll be putting a bit more effort into titles moving forward, so that'll be fun. The idea behind this post is what most selfless people struggle to balance. Setting yourself ablaze to keep others warm. It's a terrible and detrimental habit of the selfless lifestyle and it plagues those that find themselves guilty. I myself am terribly guilty, so this post will be a bit more personal for me.

First, let's talk about what it means to be selfless. The key word here of course is selfless, so whether you offer someone the last bite of your food or the clothes off your back, both actions hold true to the key word. Some people are major or minor in the act of their selflessness, but we can often get consumed by it regardless of the scale. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the most selfless person in the world, in fact sometimes I can be quite selfish. Contradicting your selflessness is of the utmost importance. If you dive to deeply in to the selfless lifestyle, you will start burning alive. Not in the idea of a standard fire where it will take a few minutes and you'll be toast. Think of it as a fire starting inside your heart or your mind and it creeps. It never severely burns, it only continues to creep. Seemingly out of no where, the fire roars with power and you are taken aback by its strength. You've been burned from the inside out and now you need to find a way to build yourself back up.

Plain and simple, building yourself back up sucks. You gave everything to those around you, becoming consumed in the behavior of helping others. Somewhere along the way you got lost and you start forgetting how to take care of yourself. Living your life without loving yourself is a pretty damn miserable way to live. For those of you that might take offense to this, I'm writing this post to you as someone who is incredibly guilty of this practice. To the point where I will have to take time away from my surroundings just to learn to build myself back up and love myself again. It's the consumption of the idea that we are spreading happiness. Everyone around us is happy and smiling. They are all enjoying their lives, so why does it matter whether or not we are enjoying ours. This is a consistent thought process in the selfless lifestyle and excuse my language, but fuck is it sad. It's sad because I feel exactly what you are feeling when you are reading this. That feeling of wanting to lay down for a day and watch your favorite show, but instead you get roped into doing things. Or giving advice to someone that has had the same problem for the last five months and you are too nice to let them down easily. Relating to another post of mine, maybe your kindness gets viewed as a weakness and you are considered a pushover.

It's a weirdly frustrating way to live life. If I had the perfect answer for how to fix it, I'd let you know immediately. Seeing as it's something I still struggle with myself. However, what I've found is that you really need to make the time for yourself to be selfish. It's okay to say no sometimes and it's okay to turn people down for the sake of your own mental health. Every single human, no matter how loving or friendly they may seem, needs a moment to disdain everything around them and take a bath to reset. My quest to balancing the selfless lifestyle lies in how selfless I can be without losing myself in the process. I'm aware that I'll crash and burn pretty hard along the way, but it's all for the sake of finding that balance. If you were only to read two lines of this post, it should be the next two. Learn to be selfish at the appropriate times and take care of your own responsibilities, put yourself first. Poor yourself a glass of wine, draw a bath, or go on a hike and say fuck the world, even if just for a moment.

Excuse my language, become selfish, and WashYourAss

- Noble