Recidivism

As Wikipedia defines it, recidivism is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or have been treated or trained to extinguish that behavior. Unfortunately that's me right now. All of my effort to change and to act more motivated and to be a better person, well I'm back in square 1. It's like I've been doing the mile trying to get to the next vantage point and I've just realized that I'm running on a treadmill. I've made a little progress doing some assignments ahead of time and trying to be less critical of people but it's just so hard. They say that the greatest test of your strength is to defeat yourself. But everytime I've tried, I've failed. When my alarm goes off, I succumb to the darkest attractions of lethargy and laziness. Whenever I have the chance to start a project early, the demons of procrastination come out to play. Whenever I try to act nice to someone, the evil bitch takes over.

There are so many people and things that test my patience and my inner strength. Right now, my mother has a friend from Korea living with us for 2 months with her kid and her kid's friend so that they can learn English while going to school in the States. The worst part is that they're both in 5th grade, the same grade that my devil brother is in.

Don't get me wrong, I love my brother though I try not to show it. But when he's with his friends, well that's a whole different story. The friend of the kid that came just drives me absolutely nuts. I have no idea what it is, he just does. He's a complete stranger and he's living in my house, eating at my dinner table, peeing in my bathroom. And I absolutely despise him. I know that I've resolved to not hate or despise anything but I just can't help it. When he chews, he makes the most disgusting noises. When he talks, his tone of voice is so irritating and the things he says are aggravating. When he sits on my couch doing nothing, it makes me batty. I've tried to reason through it but there's no rational explanation to my hate.

The more I thought about it, the more I drew parallels to a situation before. When I was in the 6th grade I believe, my cousin came to live with us permanently. His mom and dad, my aunt and uncle, passed away in a horrific and tragic car accident and he was the only survivor. He had lived with his grandmother for a while before coming to our door. At first I tried to be absolutely nice to the kid out of pity. But eventually I just couldn't take it. I had the exact same feelings of irrational hate that I have for the kid I wrote about before. I couldn't shake it.

Now here comes the bad part. At that age, I was a hateful child. Mean and a bully. So I acted on my irrational hate. I would hide his homework folder so that he would scramble to find it in the mornings and get harshly scolded by my mother. He would snore, so while he was sleeping I would pinch his nose until he started to breathe out of his mouth. I would only share things with my brother and show favoritism. I made life hell for the kid but the worst thing that I did was make my mother despise him as well. So after several months, he left to be with his grandmother again.

I still to this day feel so guilty about what I did. The poor kid did nothing wrong and I made his life so much worse than it already was. The poor kid never really knew a mother's love which he could have had. A couple years later, I was looking for an extra folder for school and I found an odd, old one. I opened it up and it had pages and pages of legal documents for adoption. My mother was originally going to adopt my cousin. That hit hard. I feel so ashamed of myself and I haven't told my mother about what I did but I have a feeling she already knows. I'm so sorry to him. I will never forget what I did to him, ever.

This is what people mean when they say that hate causes misery. I'm trying to change, I really am.