When You Put Fire to Everything You Touch
A lot of people had no benefits whatsoever in being friends with me
“Boy you ain’t worth the skin off my knuckles. You put fire to everything you touch and walk away while it burns” — Lester Freamon in “The Wire”
Do you know anyone who puts fire to everything they touch, a person whose behavior is not only self-destructive, but so self-destructive that they harm everyone close to them?
“Hurt people hurt people” is the famous adage that describes the phenomenon, and I won’t call anyone else out because it’s not my place to. But for a while, I felt like one of those self-destructive people who harmed everyone around him, who was so radioactive that associating my mere presence with someone else hurt them too.
I put fire to everything I touched, and then walked away while it burned. I can’t describe why, but I felt like I was just oozing toxicity and radioactivity everywhere, from the people I interacted with to the surfaces I touched.
Shame would be a light word to describe how I felt. I guess the closest analogy would be like wrecking ball, which destroyed everything in its path, since I just kept making mistakes and hurting people. Needless to say, it wasn’t pleasant to the people around me, and it wasn’t very pleasant to me…
