Toxic People

I'm looking down the barrel of forty years old, and there's still so much about life that I struggle to figure out. There are a few major answers, however, that have revealed themselves in the past few years, one of them being the negative affect of toxic people.

My twin sister, the proverbial bad seed, who's lived the same forty years on Earth that I have, has always surrounded herself with a swirl of drama; being evicted from her tenth apartment, brushes with the law, lies, treachery, deceits too numerous to totally recount.

I realized, one day, after speaking with her on the phone, that my whole being had changed. My face was clenched in a harsh frown, my blood pressure was elevated and I literally felt sick to my stomach. One little phonecall from her and I was tied up in a knot of angst that had me feeling physically ill.

When I really looked at the sum total of our time spent together as brother and sister, I realized that any good times we'd had together were pre-Reagan era. For decades, I had allowed her to draw me into her swirl with confrontational bait. Enough was enough.

I vowed to stop taking the frantic phonecalls and reading the rambling letters dropped at my door. Life is far too short to be surrounded in such bullshit. I'd rather spend time playing with my kid or doing something else that actually makes me happy. Long-term exposure to toxic people like my sister can be a very stealthy thing. Some people might just brush it off and say "Oh, that's just how she is" or "I wish she would be a little nicer." As for me, the lesson that I've learned is that if you keep breathing the asbestos, sooner or later you're gonna get the cancer.