Vampires

A mood vampire. Do you know one?

Sometimes it is your roommate. Sometimes it is your family. Sometimes it is even your best friend.

What is a mood vampire?

A mood vampire is someone or something that just makes your day go bad every time you must come into contact with it. It sucks anything good that happened out of your day and leaves you with bad feelings, usually anger and frustration.

What happens when a person is bitten by a vampire in the movies? Well, they become a vampire. This is exactly what happens with mood vampires: Once it sucks the happy out of you, you go around with all these negative feelings inside. Then you find someone happy and your bad mood bites their happy one, and puts them in a bad mood too. And so the cycle goes.

A mood vampire usually has no idea that they are one: they just go along with what they do, not realizing that they are just ruining your day. In which case, it is your responsibility to tell them, is it not? How will they ever know if you don't tell them?

But even if they do know, will they change? They could write it off as "just their personality." They might argue that it isn't their fault. They might try to make you feel badly. How does someone kill a mood vampire? Do you just force a silver stake of happiness into their anger? Do you shed joyful sunlight on the negative feelings rotting away inside them? And how can you continue to stick by someone so depressing that they call a coffin their bed?

I suppose "With man this is impossible, but God all things are possible. (Matthew 19:26). "But this is a hard thing to accept and live with. Where does someone call it quits so that their own sanity doesn't deteriorate? Should you ever?