Discovering Empathy

I feel that it is important to document the seismic changes stirring within my heart, body, and spirit. I believe that I have at last conquered my mental illnesses. On my twenty-eighth birthday and the few days that followed, I finally found my humanity.

Around a week prior, a strange feeling entered my mind. There was a simultaneous hardening and softening. This hardening has blessed me with an incredible level of discipline, along with a general feeling of fierceness and toughness. The softening, on the other hand, has taken place in my capacity to feel and understand the quality of something, or the meaning and work behind it. In other words, I have become more appreciative of minute details, especially as they concern social interaction.

To give an example: on the first day of the semester that I skipped, I was sitting in a chair watching people pass by. I saw a girl I liked immensely, and this sent an intense emotional reaction reverberating throughout my body. I jerked my face downward and wore an expression as if I were about to cry, which she likely witnessed. Once the emotion passed, I looked up to see her reaction to me after the weight loss I had gone through. I placed a thoroughly blank, emotionless expression on my face and looked at her as she walked by. Her face showed annoyance, and it grew more severe as she watched me looking.

I spent months afterward trying to derive meaning from this interaction. Only now has the actual answer dawned on me: her expression was intended to tell me that I should stop looking at her. This revelation may seem trivial to many who read this, but the inner work and time required for me to reach it have been immense. Its value is priceless.

When your outlook throughout your life is of nothing but immense misery, the ability to feel empathy is stamped out and replaced with intense defiance. These defiant mannerisms, born of a fear of death, tend to impart feelings of danger and unease in those who witness them. I wrote in a prior article about the concept of the ‘shade of terror,’ though I did not yet have a precise definition for it. It is the refusal to feel empathy.

I always wondered why my father would cry when I showed him videos of me doing pushups. I realize now that he understood the amount of work required to achieve what I had done in those videos. I also realize that he is happy for me, given the sorry state I was in before. Above all, I now know that he is fearless.

I have cried every morning for the past three days. The realization that this girl will probably never like me made me cry. The realization that I hurt people made me cry, as did the fact that I embarrassed others or made them feel pity for me. The realization that I have attained my goal of becoming a great person has also made me cry. The ability to empathize with others also extends to myself.