Empathy

I have a lot of trouble dealing with other people's pain. The reasons behind this have changed over the years I think; I've become more sensitive to the fact that other people hurt. I can't put my finger on when the change happened, but my responses to others in crisis have become harder for me to rein in or deal with. I sometimes feel it is working opposite of how it should; my skin should harden as I grow older, but in many ways I feel thinner on the outside, more susceptible to sympathies, to breaking down myself. Perhaps it's my own slow healing.

I think I had a much harder childhood than I ever let myself know or imagine. I talk to people about my experiences or see others going through what I dealt with and I realize that I was dealing with more than any teenage girl should have to take on. At the time I wanted everyone to hurt along with me; I wanted everyone to experience the same kind of pain so we could all be in some sort of club together; maybe I thought it was status quo. Maybe somewhere inside I realized my need to cry and contort and fall on the floor in a heap but couldn't break through the decorum of my psyche unless I took others down with me.

As I got older I adopted this crazy, "Get Over It!" attitude that inflitrated my relationships with everyone. I couldn't stand to be around people who wore their hearts on their sleeve, and felt that people who expressed true emotions were babies or weak or . . . I don't even know. I couldn't accept that I was still hurting and therefore couldn't allow anyone else to hurt either. Other people's pain made me uncomfortable because I didn't understand my own.

So things have changed again as I've gotten older. The last two years were such a raw, horrible healing process for so many of my transgressions, my situations, my past ills and wounds. I come out on the other side with a different view of my experiences and a different view of how women deal with their world in general.

I don't want anyone to hurt anymore. I've come to the conclusion that what I went through in various moments of my young adult life was absolutely heinous and no girl should ever have to go through any of it and how could we STILL perpetuate a world where girls grow up scared and out-of-control and angry and unable to deal with their lives. Sometimes I see girls fighting the way I did for so long and I wish I was the only one who ever held these misconceptions; who ever felt stuck and unable to reach out. There are these futile moments I've begun to have on a regular basis where I want to save everyone and know, horribly know, that I can't.

I used to get so angry at myself for breaking down, for letting anyone (including myself) see any sort of womanly humanness in my nature. I used to cry and then beat myself up for it - fight it off, steel myself against the onslaught of uncontrollable emotion.

Now I just get in my car and cry like a baby. Too many women know unneccesary pain in this world.