The gift of life must be delicately, assiduously and lovingly looked after and cherished rather than being spent and endured with self-imposed misery, queasiness and anguish. How do we inflict such doleful state upon ourselves? By giving our life’s control in toxic hands, stony hearts and mean minds. Our choice of wrong people assassinates the verve, peace and happiness of life. Giving up, anything addictive, and moving on is one of the most arduous yet celebratory achievements one can accomplish. An intense relationship is far more addictive and harder to give up than any known drug to date. With self-conviction, support of well-wishers and help of rehabilitation facilities one can get off the drugs. Whereas, a relationship is like a deserted, vast engulfing sea with blazing sun and levitating vultures atop and no shore in sight. May of us if not most, remain unsuccessful to swim out of that savaging sea without being dehydrated or dead. Clinging on and hoping against hope eat up the best days of our mental and physical energy and leave us dry and rotten in a lifeless body, soul destroying mental mayhem and spiritless soul. There is no set definition of a toxic relationship or a wrong person but in many cases selfishness, ego and self-pride dominate and blithely chastise and slaughter slowly the tender and true affection. Sometimes the level of selfishness is so high that even otherwise a morally decent person becomes heartless, mean and insensitive. This is the person who otherwise would proclaim to be your stalwart supporter and well-wisher by its empty talks and dry prayers. Come there a testing time, it will abandon and leave you in lurch for its own interests, insecurities or fears. When you will be drowning, this person will raise encouraging slogans standing at the shore, demanding you to strive harder, paddle in the right direction and fuming for not having learnt to swim in your mother’s womb but will not throw the rope to pull you out thinking that this rope might come handy at some other day. Indulged in its own phenom and hubris this judgmental and self-obsessed mind will banter and cogently pronounce you frivolous, inadequate, intellectually dwarf and full of flaws. It will disown you when you need to be fortified the most. This dismissiveness and belittling will parse your resolve, chug your comfort and thwart you from advancing and gaining control of your unruly thoughts. You find yourself in a taxing quagmire of disappointment, inferiority complex and at the lowest level of morale. You try harder and hardest but it will never be good enough for its meritocracy. You will always remain a gawk. Every relationship has expectations as basic as respect, care and attention to as paramount as a commitment and having someone’s back. But it is a sad reality that this person, though, not oblivion of these conventions of life absolves itself conveniently of any such decency of due deed. It will disappear after inflicting excruciating pain and turning you into a smoldering coal and will reappear when you would have dealt with the annihilating calamity shedding every leftover tear and burning the very last drop of blood to survive. And it will pretend as if its hunky dory and nothing ever happened and it was just your own foolishness. You will never have that shoulder to cry on or that embrace to make you feel better. The days and nights spent in restlessness will become a load that pitch you down and down. But your misery is that you feel possessed, fixated and incapacitated. You value this person so high that its perfunctory and negativity attitude towards you becomes validations and reassurances of your inabilities and inadequacies. Your mind bluffs and squeamishly raves. Nothing works to cast aside and vanquish the fret and palpable melancholy. You become a slave. You accept the humiliating wisecracking, badgering and bantering as your way of being smitten while keep taking plunges in desolation and denial. Empathy and compassion are not in its lexicon. You will be grappling with yourself – sometimes down with depression and at others high with hope. Hope to win over. From psychiatric sessions to sleeping pills you will try abound to help yourself but a painkiller cannot cure the cancer. What you need is – to swerve away from toxicity. Only salvation is to recognize and acknowledge your prestige, dignity, ability and worth. No one must be given the right and chance to run you over and crush your personality. You are unique and worth loving and for that matter you must love yourself first. Shut down every negativity and every demoralizing and demotivating influence in your life. Have a relationship on equal terms. Yes, be smitten, yes love a person from the core of your heart, yes be ready to go to the gallows for it if need be, yes be crazy and intense and give priority to its choices than of your own but only if you know for sure that you are respected and your integrity, comfort and dignity is in reliable hands and you will not be abandoned if there comes a time. Take control of your happiness – you worth it and deserve better. The writer can be reached at Twitter @sunniyakhn