Shards of Shattered Covenants

There is no worse betrayal in the world than the person in which time, hope, honor and integrity have been invested then ends in dismay as that person decides everything isn’t enough and that they will viciously and bloodily go their own way; but instead of leaving with grace and manners, they decide to stink up the place by trying to tear down Good Things in their slash-and-burn-exit.

The only solace we take in their tarring, irrational, accusatory, departure is the evidence they leave behind in the form of a three-page, single-spaced screed of their
rage that we will preserve and share with others for eternity as an example of how not to lead a human life.

I’m not discussing anyone I directly know or love in my writing life or my in publisher role with the Boles Blogs Network — but I am able to perceive and discern bad behavior in others against people I know and respect and, sometimes, you have to realize there are undiagnosed mentally ill people roaming around in the world who are able to “get by” even though they are irreparably damaged.  Their cunning is in the fullness of their furtive masking of who and what they really are beneath the surface exchange.

Broken people are able to tolerate the average facade of their lives up to a certain point — sometimes as long as a year or two — until an unknowable or unwitting trigger event sets off an embedded emotional response, and they blow up on the inside and spew their bile on the rest of us.

We can never know or understand the undiagnosed broken haunting among us — they do not deserve our pity or our respect because they know there’s something bitterly wrong with them — but they are unable and unwilling to fix themselves because of a severe narcissistic disorder that makes them believe the world must bend to their gutter level or they will threaten to burn away all the beauty and goodness in the universe with their bad behavior.

These emotional neophytes use the danger of their disability against the rest of us to get their way — and many times the world is able to accommodate the ridiculous against the sublime just to bend without breaking.

However, the broken are unable to remain intact because there’s always something — perceived, intuited, invented or realized — that will set them off again and again on a circular rage that figures in their lives like a Mobius strip of a roller-coaster existence; and instead of wanting to help them get better, we cannot wait to run from them lest they infect us with their misery and with their wanton self-despise for the shards of the shattered covenants that trail them like blood in the water.