Kleptomania

I had a lot of problems as a kid.

I lied about everything, I was ugly, and I was constantly making my Barbie have sex with my best friend’s younger brother’s Spider-Man action figure against its will.

Worse still, I would take anything that wasn’t nailed down.

Pokémon cards, stuffed animals, key chains, loose change, twenty-seven pairs of my second grade teachers safety scissors… I had to have it all.

Despite always coming clean to Mom over hot and fast guilt tears, I would continue to pocket things that I had no right to just because I could.

A phenomenon that ceased (save one drunken Uber Eats fiasco) once I was old enough to understand that someone else stands to get hurt in the process.

I wasn’t the only one.

And I feel like if you asked anyone else who shared my compulsion they would share the idea that it was never really about fulfilling a need or even a want.

It was about power.

Though we may not steal money off the dressers of our loved ones any longer (or maybe you do – that’s between you and your therapist), we’ve moved on to stealing bigger, more important things without even realizing it.

All for the sake of satisfying an unconscious need for power.

Without even knowing it we started taking other peoples sense of peace.

Robbing them of their sense of safety, self-esteem, and time.

We drive too fast and glance at our phones too frequently despite our passengers. We get adventurous when we drink and put our company in uncomfortable situations. We step off of curbs without checking both ways, and make jokes that shouldn’t be made.

For the sake of thrill we have the ability to singlehandedly strip the ones around us of their sense of safety.

We steal from them a fundamental right because we fail to see the implications of our carelessness.

We make catty comments behind each other’s backs, make criticisms that aren’t ours to make, and enter each other in hypothetical competitions that no one volunteered to take part in.

We murder one another’s self esteem by comparing and evaluating instead of staying in our own lane.

We drag each other to a place we have no right to step foot into, let alone bring unapproved guests to.

We tell people we’d love to catch up. We tell them we’ll call, even if it’s never our intention. We ask them questions and dig for information when we don’t really care about the answers or the narrative.

We’re nosy, not committed.

Maybe we want to satisfy a sense of loneliness. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s boredom.

For any reason, it’s theft of time. Theft of the most precious and limited resource we have as human beings.

Time we don’t get back or rebuild – all for the sake of not feeling alone, or small, or stagnant.

We sacrifice integrity and accountability for the sake of harvesting power from slipping other people’s safety, self esteem, and time into our back pockets.

We don’t need it, nor do we really even want it. It’s power.

Power we didn’t know we were dependent on.

After years of taking and being taken from, I realized that I would much rather be stripped of my material possessions than the untouchable parts of myself that I never gave anyone else permission to play with.

Things can be replaced. Character can’t.

Drive a little slower and call who you said you would.