Troubled today

"You can only love others once you learn to love yourself"

How do you help someone who is clearly on a pathway to self destruction? I don't really want practical answers to this question..I'm just here to vent. I know that what people will say to me are things I've already heard.

I'm so frustrated! I've met a lot of people in my short life, and I'm happy to to able to say that I was able to help a fair amount of them selflessly whenever they needed my help..but today - I'm absolutely flummoxed. I don't have a clue!

How do you help people who i'll admit have had it tough (but haven't others..many of us!?) but are drowning themselves in the catastrophic whirlpool of alcohol consumption, blaming others for the fuck ups in their lives, giving up things that are good for them, replacing those things with things that are the yellow brick road to absolute disaster?

Isn't it the height of irony? We say we drink to get high and happy, but alcohol is a medically certified depressant, we say drugs help us escape from gruesome realities but they actually make you paranoid and open doors to your life that you might've dealt with and closed years ago, and we say smoking relieves stress, but actually it increases your blood pressure?


How do you try to tell someone that they're ruining their one chance of getting back on track? And how do you prepare for an answer to the question they might ask you 5 years later - why didn't you stop me?

How do you stop someone from ruining their own life? do you just say - hey its his/her life/choice? Or do you go out there and do something drastic? Do you wait for a tragedy to occur that might alter that self destructive lifestyle and force a change? Or do you try to avert that disaster before it happens?

How do you sit back and just watch them getting consumed by negativity and consuming intoxicants incessantly? Do you sit back and watch? Do you take action? Is it your business to do so? Or do you walk away? How do you walk away without looking back? How do you know with absolute certainty that you couldn't have done ANYTHING to help?

I've never been one to give up on people, even when in retrospect perhaps I should've given up on some before they pulled me into their world of ugliness. Is that what I should be doing? Should I just give up knowing that I now have the strength I didn't have 7 years ago to stand my ground without getting sucked into the bullshit? I just don't know what to do.