Empathy—everyone thinks it’s so wonderful! I’m often told I’m an empathetic person, as if it’s a compliment. But truthfully, no one realizes how deeply empathetic I am, and what a blight it is. I would trade in my empathy for a good salty vice—gluttony, selfishness, sloth, whatever. According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is “the ability to relate to another person’s pain vicariously, as if one has experienced that pain themselves.” (I’m going to ignore the noun/pronoun--“one”/”themselves”--number disagreement.) The thing is, I experience another’s pain exactly as if it were my own. And therein lies the problem. There is a lot of pain in this world, and some days I think I feel it all: I am stressed out by the predicament of my friend who has an instant to pack a lifetime and a loftful of accumulation into a modest-sized new apartment. I feel her anxiety about whether she can afford the new place. I feel the distraction of my friend whose beloved nonagenarian aunt died leaving her to dis
Comments
Post a Comment