December 18, 2003
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I am really pleased with today’s Free Range Poetry. Every once in a while I find a site full of awesome astronomical pictures which inspires me. So I harvest the pictures, add my poems, and post a string of the haiga as my Free Range Poetry entries.
***
So few people know me. Even my family barely knows me. I tell them things, and it just rolls off them like water on oil. They don’t listen. Sure they know things about me. They accept that I’m a Pagan, asocial (not anti-social), a poet, writer, and artist. They don’t know, nor do they seem to care, how I feel about things -in my life, in the world.
At work they think I’m demented but pleasant. I make them laugh. This is by design. I’m a very powerful empath. Miserable people make me miserable. Happy people make me happy.
Guess which I choose to be when I have the option.
But working with the public is hell for someone like me. All those people around me. I remember an episode on a sci-fi/fantasy show. I think it was the one Asimov did, but I forget what it was called; it’s been so long. It has nothing to do with my empathy, but the image is appropriate. Apparently this guy had such a bad experience in school that he still had flashbacks about it when he visited the playground with his own young son. From my own memories of childhood, I’d say he wasn’t so far off the mark. But in any event, he and his son somehow traded places and the kids swarmed him like a group of angry demon rats ready to tear him apart.
Yeah, that’s what it’s like being an empath in the service industry. Everyone wants, needs, demands your attention. Gimme, Gimme, Gimme all you have. Their needs and underlying issues are the claws that rip me to shreds by the end of the day. A night’s sleep is barely enough time to recover.
Yes I know about shields and such. I use them with the energy/psychic vampires when I encounter them. Most of them don’t even know what they’re doing, so it’s easy to fend them off. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met one who was conscious of their energy vampirism. Aside from that though, shields are distracting. I need to keep my empathy active or how will I know which way to jump, how to react -when someone is acting one way but feeling another. I can’t hear with earplugs, I can’t feel through a shield. And they’re physically draining to maintain for 8-12 hours a day, five days a week.
But I diverge from the point. I’ve told my family about this too. They don’t seem to believe me. Family gatherings are just as hellacious as work. The only difference is that my family is not so easily placated as some moron looking for a book they’ll never read. They seem to resent it when the living room is full of visitors and after a half hour I retreat to my room. (Cause you know, all we need is an empath in a room of irritable and bored family and friends to take it all in and then spew it all back out at them.) But even without my empathy, there is no room for me even to sit on the floor, and besides I’m just standing there silent like a looming hairy coatrack. (I can comb my hair over my face and look like the girl from The Ring.)
Better to retreat to my room where a little distance will make their presence bearable; where the shields around my room, which have accumulated with time, will further block out their own boredom and irritability.
I hate the holidays.
