What if you don’t like me anymore? What if this changes the way you view me? What if you don’t view me the way I view myself? What if you view me in the ways that I am MOST afraid to be viewed? The worry can become paralyzing.
There is so much about being an empath that is beautiful. I remember a moment – I couldn’t have been more than six – where my mom sat me down on the pink tile of the counter in our hall bathroom. Crocodile tears were streaming down my face, and my mom was trying to soothe me…. no, not from some sort of injury or childhood trauma…but because of the scene in White Fang where the guy tries to make the wolf run back into the woods. “You have a soft heart hunny, and that is a good thing,” she said, as she looked me in the eye. (#parentingwin) This ability to feel things from the outside intensely…it is a gift and a curse. As a person who wants to spend her life being present in the midst of people’s pain and vulnerability, this natural level of empathy will be an asset and a necessity, especially now that I have learned how to create some healthy boundaries. In helping situations, I have and am continuing to learn how to remain present with and identifying with the feelings brought up by the pain of others without taking on the pain of others.
That being said, I am learning now just how challenging this “gift” of being an empath can be on my ability to live the life I feel called to as an individual. I can’t think of a time when I made a decision without thinking about the emotional consequences of EVERYONE it touches. I can often imagine and visualize how people might be feeling (empathy) but then I start to take RESPONSIBILITY for how everyone else is feeling. And this isn’t just when people tell me how they feel – it’s mostly just my assumptions of how I’ve made other people feel.
Something people may not know about anxiety is that it is often times not about our own fear of dying. For me, the anxiety wasn’t about the pain that I may experience, it was about the pain that I may cause others. That is what kept me up nights, fretting over whether or not I needed to go to the emergency room for what was, certainly, a heart attack. It wasn’t a fear of losing my life, it was a fear of taking a mother away from my children – of taking a wife away from my husband – of taking a daughter away from my parents. Here is the big flaw in this thought, as I am learning, that is connected still to all of this work for me…I feel deeply responsible for the ways others feel, especially when I feel like I have control or influence over it.
Absolutely, our actions have consequences…but we also aren’t responsible for every little detail of our lives. So many of the painful things that have happened or will happen are so far outside of our control, and it is unfair and unreasonable for us to ask ourselves to predict and prevent every painful thing from befalling those we love. Miscarriages happen. Car accidents happen. Cancer happens. And most of the time, there is nothing we could do to prevent them. Could we have caught the caner earlier…maybe…but what would it have cost? How much would worrying and constant doctors visits and living in fear would have cost us…and would that have been a life worth living?
Live today, friends. The bad things…the painful things…they will come. You will walk through them. They will change you and shape you and be hard – almost impossible…but they are not ours to control. You will cross those bridges when you come to them, and no amount of planning or fretting will make that journey any easier. We make the road by walking, loves. Keep walking. Keep doing the next right thing. And today, find at least a little glimmer of joy (even if it’s a dark day) somewhere in the breath you take today, and the chance you have to keep showing up.
Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash
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