Slaying the Attitude Vampire

The workplace often acts as a stimulant for the attitude vampire. Once inside the building, one may hear an ominous sucking sound, soft as a sigh over his or her shoulder and feel his or her soul slowly draining away. How long before one becomes another minion of the damned? The fight for sanity is arduous, the struggle for independent thought a burgeoning vine beating its roots against creativity, strangling any energy remaining to be oneself. Life outside work? What's that? The term is becoming unrecognizable in its complexity. If one can maintain a certain amount of dignity after the barrage of put downs, let downs, and wind downs, then there may still be something to gain.

Slaying the attitude vampire will prove daunting, but obtainable, nonetheless. The vampire lurks in the basement of the self, plunged deep within the dank hallows of dark thoughts. It shies away from the brightness of pleasant emotions often experienced when involved in activities one enjoys.

Attitude vampires enter the darkness through any vulnerable entryways created by holes worn into one's self esteem and sense of self worth by anxiety, angst, and anger. Once the vampire burrows into its dark hole, it cowers, feeding on the negativity, drawing the negativity to itself like a magnet, increasing the darkness. The dank darkness, while a rich environment for the hungry vampire, suffocates the inhabited, stifling the pathways brightness and happiness once traversed. A constant sense of foreboding overwhelms the inhabited and the desire to sleep, to be buried in external darkness in order to balance out the darkness within becomes unbearable bringing one to the edge of insanity. Standing on the edge of that brink and gazing into the downward spiral disappearing into black is dizzying and slightly exhilarating. One may even feel the internal vampire urging one forward, pushing one's toes closer to the crumbling drop because it's this eternal and internal plunge into the negative light the attitude vampire so longs for.

There is something enticing about these vampires, something that makes it so difficult to rid oneself of them. They seduce one's emotions easily because it is often times so much easier to be negative than it is to be positive. It's easier to harbor a grudge than it is to swallow one's pride and forgive. Sometimes it feels better to rant and complain, considering just how simple it is to find the bad in anything.

These attitude

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