Devotion

How much devotion is too much devotion? Is there even such a thing as "too much"? Is there a difference between devotion and clinginess? These are but some of the questions that people think about but hardly ever want to talk about, civilly at least.

For me, devotion is healthy until you have renounced your friends, and your dignity and self-respect all for something that might only have been false hope from the start. You were probably too blind to see this until after the fact. Or post-facto as some say. Of course, you only realize this in retrospect because that's how it is: one only learns things during and after, not before. Like I just said. Circularly.

Now, devotion can go towards a wide range of things. Hobbies and people seem to be the two that arrest the most devotion. Not that it's necessarily bad... until you go too far. When you become too devoted to a person, you're either clingy or obsessed, and if you take THAT too far they'll break up with you or slap you with a restraining order. Either way, if you show too much of anything, you're considered creepy.

Devotion is something that I've given almost liberally, now that I actually think about it. Perhaps for misguided reasons or because other reasons that are, at present, unknown to me. One thing is for certain: I fucked up. How? Because I learned that there is such a thing as too much devotion and that giving too much to something else is a bad move. Especially when you believe yourself to be self-less by not demanding anything in return. That should only prove devotion and not a misguided sense of altruism. Asking for something or even demanding it isn't the end of the world, it just shows that in order to continue with any form of devotion there must be validation. Devotion without validation is a sucker's game. When that "something else" vanishes, you're left with a hole to fill, if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you're left with a vacuum, or the stereotypical but inaccurate image of a black hole. Because it sucks everything up only to destroy.

Of course, one can recover from this particular loss but the time it takes to gather your marbles is time that could have been put to better use doing anything else like improving the self or the environment (generally speaking). This is probably why one should be careful and not be so goddamn devoted to one thing that everything else falters and fails because of it. Two way streets, give and take, giving without receiving is a sucker's game. Receiving without giving is for parasites.

Devotion.