Derek Healey

“To suffer is as human as to breathe.”
― Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two

“The only person that should wear your ring is the one person that would never…

1. Ask you to remain silent and look the other way while they hurt another.
2. Jeopardize your future by taking risks that could potentially ruin your finances or reputation.
3. Teach your children that hurting others is okay because God loves them more. God didn’t ask you to keep your family together at the expense of doing evil to others.
4. Uses religious guilt to control you, while they are doing unreligious things.
5. Doesn't believe their actions have long lasting repercussions that could affect other people negatively.
6. Reminds you of your faults, but justifies their own.
7. Uses the kids to manipulate you into believing you are nothing. As if to suggest, you couldn’t leave the relationship and establish a better Christian marriage with someone that doesn’t do these things. Thus, making you believe God hates all the divorced people and will abandon you by not bringing someone better to your life, after you decide to leave. As if!
8. They humiliate you online and in their inner circle. They let their friends, family and world know your transgressions.
9. They tell you no marriage is perfect and you are not trying, yet they are the one that has stirred up more drama through their insecurities.
10. They say they are sorry, but they don’t show proof through restoring what they have done.
11. They don’t make you a better person because you are miserable. They have only made you a victim or a bitter survivor because of their need for control over you.
12. Their version of success comes at the cost of stepping on others.
13. They make your marriage a public event, in order for you to prove your love online for them.
14. They lie, but their lies are often justified.
15. You constantly have to start over and over and over with them, as if a connection could be grown and love restored through a honeymoon phase, or constant parental supervision of one another’s down falls.
16. They tell you that they don’t care about anyone other than who they love. However, their actions don’t show they love you, rather their love has become bitter insecurity disguised in statements such as, “Look what I did for us. This is how much I care.”
17. They tell you who you can interact with and who you can’t.
18. They believe the outside world is to blame for their unhappiness.
19. They brought you to a point of improvement, but no longer have your respect.
20. They don't make you feel anything, but regret. You know in your heart you settled.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Being a samurai is all about selfless service and if the lord abuses the servant, it is no longer a situation of service; it becomes the situation of a victim. It is never acceptable for a samurai to be a victim. It is never acceptable to allow a lord to abuse you or rob you of your dignity. In such a situation, it is acceptable to walk away.”
― Alexei Maxim Russell, Instruction Manual for the 21st Century Samurai

“Man's feeling of homelessness, of alienation has been intensified in the midst of a bureaucratized, impersonal mass society. He has come to feel himself an outsider even within his own human society. He is trebly alienated: a stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social apparatus that supplies his material wants.

But the worst and final form of alienation, toward which indeed the others tend, is man's alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can - usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten.”
― William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy