This is the main issue with red flags...often times they make you feel good in the beginning when really they should be like a crimson flag being waved towards a raging bull. That is what it SHOULD be like...but somehow, it so often isn’t.
I have pretty much known that every red flag that I ignored, granting passage to its initial feel good vibe, was going to kick my ass later on. Every. Single. Time.
But I have allowed myself to become swept up and away because even though the flag is rapidly blowing in the breeze of my recklessness, fueled with the passionate denial and delusion operating, in fact, controlling my life while its scarlet color screams for my attention, there is something oddly pleasurable about this writhing, vermillion banner waving ferociously in front of me. Something that causes me to not do what any sensible person should and would do...RUN! Or at the very least, slow down long enough to get a different perspective on this evolving shitshow.
And it is right there that all my troubles begin...with this perverse and peculiar comfort with a presence that should make me sit up and take notice...like immediately. Instead, I have this tendency to back burner all of those feelings to the contrary, sideline them in some futile attempt to...I guess put the pain off for a little longer. Feels great currently, what could possibly go wrong? Um...everything.
But that is the thing...while I may be able to stave off the misery that inevitably comes, I am fairly delusional about the fact that all these claret waves of fiber are somehow there for some other reason than to warn me that I am doing it again, ignoring myself again, selling myself out again, betraying myself again. Still.
I have been stubbornly obstinate about these types of things...to my own dismay, demise and destruction.
I am not sure why failing to heed, those obvious and real warnings red flags pose, feels good to me. I just know that it always has and so I have always stood dumbly in my life saying to myself, “isn’t that a pretty carmine streamer...” As if I can only see the banderole and never seem to allow the deeper thought of WARNING to enter my mind.
I am a risk taker and perhaps that is it. While I am no Evil Knevil or free climber or anything close to that, I have always been an adrenaline junkie, risk taker, a “fuck it, what the hell” kind of person. And it has taken me literally forever to figure out that while the initial high feels amazing, I am always destroyed in the aftermath of my own decisions. This perverse, yet pleasurable feeling, I find in seeing the risk at the outset and making a somewhat conscious decision to proceed anyway because it feels good in the moment, has been the beginning of so many, many endings.
And finally, after decades of work, decades of therapy, decades of self reflection, inventory and heartbreak (mostly delivered to me by me), I believe, and I say this very tentatively, I think I am finally wiling to see those good vibes that explode with so much promise, red flags waving in the breeze of the backdraft of the inferno that rages up ahead, I am finally willing to see that I need not allow that feel good sentiment to propel me onward. Perhaps this time the feel good winds that forewarn my certain peril can be heeded and obeyed. Leading me to somewhere other than all the places I seemed destined to haunt...again, still.
