Empathy

So I'm sitting here in my living room, at 1.17 on a Monday night (Tuesday morning), buck naked because it's just too freakin' hot to wear clothes, and I am completely at a loss as to what to do with myself. I should be in bed, but however hot it is down here I know it'll be worse in my room. I've been in a shitty mood all day, for no apparent reason. If there is a reason, I certainly can't figure out what it is, which leads me to think that it's not my bad mood at all, it's someone else's and I'm just picking it up. Thankfully the blackness of the mood began to fade at about 11 this evening - 5 your time - and now I just feel kind of lost.



I'm an empath. It's what I am, it's what I do. And most of the time I can - well, not embrace it, exactly, but live with it. Most of the time I bitch a little, and then eventually shrug and say Oh well, if I weren't an empath I'd probably be a sociopath, so all things considered this way is probably better, and then I just move onto the next thing and don't really bother too much about it until the next time I'm barraged with someone else's emotions.

But then there are some days when I don't deal well at all.

If you can't understand what I'm saying, I ask you to consider this: imagine everything you've ever felt - and then multiply it by everyone you've met. Dull it down a bit - because obviously I don't get the complete uncensored emotions from everyone. But even dulled down, it's pretty crazy-making. You learn early to build your shields, or you go crazy. Some of the shields are instinctive - I don't experience the way people feel about me most of the time; my brain instinctively protects me from that - and others are ones that I've deliberately built and refined over the years.
Now and then, though, I find a person who bypasses all the shields as though they're not even there. I have one such person in my life right now. With this person, there's no off switch. The feelings don't come through all the time, but when they do there's no way of controlling them or getting rid of them. A lot of the time I don't even know if the things I feel are my own or not. And unlike with my own, I can't rationalise my way out of a bad mood when it's coming from an outside source. For better or for worse, we are bonded, and there is nothing I can do about that. Even the Ancestors can't or won't help me.
So I carry on, trying with all my power to ignore the frequent bursts of nausea or heavy feelings I get in my chest, hurting as they hurt, knowing that one of the people I love most in the world is in a heapload of pain, and also knowing that there is very little I can do about it.