Empathy | Waiting for Satan

I keep getting in trouble with my English teachers for being too mean. This has been going on for a while.

There’s something very uncollegy about the check-plus, check, check-minus system. Like they’re afraid to tell us if something is good or bad.

Like we’re children.

In my early-level courses, I was grateful for the sugarcoating. Writing is a vulnerable act, and early on encouragement is probably more important than honesty.

After a while, I began to distrust this plastic layer of niceness.

Now it’s reached the point where I completely distrust anything positive about my work.

The problem with English majors is that they’re goddman sensitive. Everyone’s got some common problem with a simple solution, but instead of trying to solve the problem they expect the universe to change around them.

I wrote all this last week. If it reads as a condemnation of people feeling bad for themselves then good – I fooled you. I also fooled myself. That’s what I was really trying to do.

But you can’t run away forever, and it looks like things have finally caught up to me.

Oftentimes when I make fun of things, it’s because I’m trying to expel something I see in myself. That’s what I was trying to do with the first half of this post, but I just couldn’t finish it.

I’ve been posting every Thursday for a while now, but I missed last week because I was staring at my computer, wondering what was standing in my way.

I like to think of myself as the type of person who is in control of their emotions, but that’s only because I know I’m not. My outside behavior is a product of carefully maintained self-manipulation.

I don’t think this is unusual, and everyone does it to some degree, but for me it’s a constant process. When I see people acting in complete disregard of their own insignificance it enrages me.

I’m going to try to be more empathetic.

~Fin

Sometimes I think that human depression is caused from an unfortunate mixture of empathy and imagination. Empathy opens you up to dark feelings that aren’t even yours, and imagination makes these feelings real and able to hurt you.

Just to keep yourself safe, you start to close off any vulnerabilities you see in yourself. You patch them up so the feelings that follow you can’t wriggle their way in and burrow inside you.

You feel proud of yourself for cleverly blocking off the hole in your chest. You don’t even mind the emptiness. The emptiness is safe. You care store all sorts of things in the emptiness. Usually some cash-money.

Everything seems to be going okay for a while. You’re lying to yourself, and you know you’re lying to yourself, but you don’t think it matters because everyone lies to themselves.

Material things do a good enough job filling the hole. You’d use something better if you had some idea of what that was, but you don’t. Maybe Jesus could fill the hole for you, but you don’t really trust him after two-thousand years of child crusades and inquisitions. Besides, you’ve visited too many museums to believe the earth is 6000 years old. So instead you just wait…

When I get like this it’s you don’t ever want to leave your bed. You know when they’re this close it’s only a matter of time, so you kind of hide to delay the inevitable. The only way you can manage any interaction is to become a quiet lonely starchild who loves with the cold distance of a terrible ice demon or human father.

You let it in the hole is filled. You feel a little less empty, but you can’t help but feel calloused, uncaring. You’re content with yourself but you don’t want anyone to see you. And you let it consume you, fearful of what may someday emerge from the void-egg around you.