Is our empathy a curse?

How can being a highly empathetic person be life’s greatest gift but also one's biggest tragedy?

Empathy is a beautiful thing. Humans have this capacity to understand and feel what another person is experiencing and place themself in their position. They are halving someone’s pain and lightening the intensity of a situation that is too much for one to handle. They do say a problem shared is a problem halved. But why do we feel this need to show empathy to people and absorb all their pain? Why do we try to emulate their struggles and challenges to feel their pain too?

We should feel lucky that we are able to comfort others and feel their pain with them so they feel less alone. It’s rewarding and allows us to become more emotionally aware. Empathy and sensitivity can help you realise things and understand people more and even reflect on your own life and actions. However, not everyone experiences empathy in the same way.

I believe that being a highly sensitive person is life’s greatest blessing and tragedy all at once. Like many, I feel empathy and my emotions so extremely and deeply but not everyone else does. This is my tragedy in some sense as I cannot make everyone feel as deeply as I do and make them understand me as much I have learnt to understand them and their emotions. People do not always have the depth to feel something so wholly that it’s debilitating. As Sylvia Plath says, “I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely” and Rainer Maria Rilke described it as “this heavy humaness”. Emotions are not just waves to me, they are like permanent imprints on my soul that last a lifetime. I remember every feeling, memory and person that they’re affiliated to. Perhaps in this life I am meant to understand, and not be understood.

But why do they say that empathy is a gift? Why do I feel such an overwhelm of sombre and tears when I see a homeless person, a single mother struggling to take care of her children, a grave with no flowers on it or parents getting mistreated by their own children. I see these people and put myself in their shoes, always presuming the worst and I break my own heart just thinking about these strangers being upset or struggling. When I see an empty restaurant, I wonder if there is a family behind it whose dream this was and is now slowly dying. When I see a young boy crying I get upset that he’ll be too scared to be this vulnerable again in the future due to ridiculous stereotypes that ‘men don’t cry’. If I see a teacher giving a lesson that they’ve put all their energy into, I feel like I have to smile and nod so they know that someone cares. When I see an old person eating alone in a restaurant, I have to convince myself that they enjoy their lonesome and they do it for their independence. In my head they have a whole family and warm home waiting for them. I have this urge to give everyone a happy ending, as if I dwell on the reality of how sad, cruel and lonely this world can be I will just break down. I find my empathy can be exhausting, I can barely watch TV without crying over the pain a fiction character is feeling. Every emotion just feels so real to me, even if it is not mine. Sometimes I think I need to live in delusion and believe all is right in the world just to get by.

Empathy is so complex as you are actively choosing to make sure other people feel heard and included as you try to take their pain away, but when does it get to the point of enough. When must you be selfish and focus on your feelings instead of holding other people up while you’re falling apart?

I like to believe our empathy is our connection to the world. We see people’s lives and problems, and our feelings control how we approach the situation. It’s like a type of nostalgia, for the past you that was happy and also present you whose fate may not be far off from these people who are struggling right now. My empathy makes me sentimental about life and as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character”.

The intensity of my empathy feels too much for my body to hold sometimes but what is the alternative… to feel nothing and be emotionally numb? I’ll take the tears of sorrow and happiness over everyone’s lives as long as it means I can feel my own emotions wholly and process all my feelings to the fullest. And if no one can understand me and my feelings, then I will learn to understand myself. No matter what happens to me, no one can take away my love, sensitivity, heart and softness that I have given out with no strings attached, for it is for theirs to keep. Learning people’s lives and stories allows them to feel seen and important, and I want people’s lives to make a mark on this world and me. And all I want is to feel and see all the beauty this life has to offer, to its highest degree.