November 27, 2007

• Empathy; or When she was good, she was very, very good, but when *They* were bad, she was horrid

  If people had told me in high school that I would some day be able to work in retail, I’d have laughed in their faces. I do at least half my holiday shopping online in order to avoid the crowds, and I do a lot of shopping throughout the year just so I won’t have to deal with shopping in stores right now. I keep a present-hoard in my closet, an accumulation of things which I will hand out for birthdays and holidays for years to come. I’ve bought things for my nephew for which he will not be ready for another seven years.

  Most people would assume that I’m some kind of freak, type “A,” present-buying personality, but the truth is that it’s better for everyone if I minimize the amount of time I have to spend with the public. This is the worst time of year for an empath. For years I was agoraphobic to the point I could hardly go shopping or to movie theaters without a companion. I still sit in the back of the theater and either bolt for the door as soon as the credits start or wait until most everyone has gone. My empathy did not make me agoraphobic, that was due to several incidents that happened in high school, but it definitely exacerbated the situation.

  I was always aware of the emotions of people and things around me. For a long time, I thought everyone could feel what others felt. So it confused me to no end the way people treated one another. My parents, people I met, everyone. For the longest time, I just picked up everything around me and expressed it in my own actions. Whenever my parents were in a bad mood, I acted out. Whether they were mad at me or each other or just irritable, so was I. My earliest memories are a blur. It seems to me I should remember more, but with few exceptions, I don’t remember much of anything until I was five and started school.

  It wasn’t until junior high school that I seriously began to question the nature of my sensitivity. For a while, I was completely paranoid. I thought everyone else must be able to sense things just as I did, but the fact that no one talked about it and no one would acknowledge how I felt when I was always completely aware of what they felt meant that for some reason they were excluding me from their society.

  My paranoia didn’t last long.

  People had been harassing me for as long as I could remember, and eventually I came to the conclusion that they could not, in fact, feel what I felt. They were as ignorant to my emotions as three blind people trying to describe an elephant by feeling it. I’d always felt isolated, but after I was attacked a few times at school and realized my peers were completely headblind, I completely withdrew. I stopped trying to make friends. I stopped going out in public where people might corner me and try to hurt me. I stayed in my room where I wouldn’t bother anyone with my presence. I didn’t try to ingratiate myself with my family any more. I wanted to be as far away from people as possible, but short of running away and living in a cave (which I actually considered), there was no way I could get any further away from the world than my room. This is when I started getting sick whenever I thought about going to school and by the time I quit school, years later, I was missing at least two days of school a week. I would actually carry all my books around in my bookbag, even when I did not need to, in case I had to defend myself. I got called into the principal’s office for threatening people, even though I was the one being threatened.

  For years, I felt it was best for everyone if I just kept to myself. I was safer that way, and I wouldn’t be bothering anyone with my oversensitivity to their situations. If you’re a strong empath, you might as well be a telepath or a psychic. Emotions have a language all their own. Learn to string them together, and you sometimes get motive and intent; you can predict people’s actions. My mother used to say I had no tact because I would blurt things out in the course of a conversation that other people found embarrassing. In the course of my childhood, I went from a very friendly, gregarious child to a moody and withdrawn young adult. Lots of kids end up like that, but I doubt many of them can say why.

  But after a while, even being alone in my room didn’t help, and sometimes I had to go out. I filled my room with plants. I found that they helped me sleep better, acting as a buffer against the thoughts and emotions of my family and the people who lived in the neighborhood. After a while, even that wasn’t enough though. It wasn’t until we moved out of the city that I began to sleep better (but even now, we live in a little town and I’m still an insomniac much of the time). My talents keep getting stronger. I hear whispering when I’m trying to sleep. I don’t know if it’s the ghosts in the house (we have at least three) or the thoughts of my family and neighbors. I have no desire to pursue it. I use a sound machine to drown out the “noise.” I know it is not a physical noise that is keeping me up at night, but the sound machine is distracting enough that I don’t hear the “voices” as clearly as I might otherwise and so I can sleep without unintentionally focusing on them.

  When I had to go out shopping, I’d try to get my mom to go with me. If I got stressed out, I’d sync up with her. Providing she wasn’t stressed, I could use her as a buffer the same way I use plants. If there’s one person I inherited my “gift” from, it’s my mom. She was mostly blocked up when I was a kid, but I could make use of her shields by syncing up with her. Don’t ask me how though. I didn’t even realize I was doing it till years later, and I don’t do it much any more. Mostly because as she gets older, she’s starting to get into metaphysical topics too and she’s not as blocked as she was when I was a kid, so it would be counter productive.

  It’s still better for me if I have as little contact with large groups of people as possible, but I can’t make a living that way (unless I find a publisher who will make me rich! heh). This time of year is nightmarish. Friendly customers are the best and can go a long way towards healing my emotional bruises, but most of the people I have to deal with are impatient and irritable, and there’s only so much of that I can take in a day before I snap. I have good shields now, but the constant emotional assault of the holidays is enough to wear down a wall of obsidian. I find myself wanting to find a dark, deserted corner like I did when I first started working after I quit school.

  For the past two days I’ve had a headache that goes away once I get home, and it’s not even December yet. I am tired of keeping up pretences. I wish everyone was aware of what empathy is and how they unintentionally affect their fellow beings. I wish everyone treated everyone around them with the respect they want for themselves. If everyone in the world woke up empathic tomorrow, I know it would be chaos, but if everyone born tomorrow and from here on out were empathic, what a wonderful future the human race would have.

  • 7:48 pm
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