I have an awful quality that has landed me in dark places many times. I am unsure how to explain how empathy or being an empath can change you or nurture you in this world. It almost feels like the book called “The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novel examines the consequences of placing such a singular individual at the center of worldly society’s conflicts, desires, passions, and egoism, both for the man himself and those he becomes involved with. A young man whose goodness, open-hearted simplicity and guilelessness lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to assume that he lacks intelligence and insight mistakenly.
When you’re an empath, you feel everything sincerely – happiness, pain, sorrow, loss, hurt – of anyone if you put your heart to it. It hurts because sometimes you barely have time to recoup and recover for yourself in any way. You cannot live with yourself from seeing someone else suffering and will go above and beyond to help them, sometimes even making an absolute fool of yourself. Empathy might help you stand in someone else’s shoes and feel every bit of their pain, but you cannot walk out of that shoes as nothing happened. You will carry it wherever you go for the better or worst.
This quality can land you in dark places in your head because sometimes people want someone to listen to them rather than fix their problems. But you can’t let them be as you see yourself as a fixer for everything. I haven’t learned from my mistakes back then; I still haven’t learned anything now. How much can a person like this take over and over again from being hurt in a morally compromised world?
I am envious of people who can be oblivious to someone’s suffering. I will never know what that feels like – not caring about anything or anyone. It would be 70% of my burden lifted off my shoulder. It’s hard to navigate life after being instilled this quality from your childhood. You can’t buy it at a grocery store; you either have it or don’t. And I would seriously sell my soul to someone to take it from me. It has only burned me enough times until now & still trying to see how it helps me in any way whatsoever. How can someone not care about anything? It’s a complex psychological thought to navigate in our colossal brain.
When you feel everything so deeply and profoundly in life, every high will be super high, while every low can be shallow.
Sadly, I’ve always been someone who still tries. After failure, stress, frustration, exhaustion, and heartbreak, I find the courage to find the best in everyone and believe that a new attempt can manifest into a new outcome.
How long can I keep this up? Time will tell.
I’m still recovering from the race physically and mentally. Along with a whole bunch of things that happened in the past 1.5 weeks. Godspeed astronaut.