“You’re not a teenager anymore. Why do you have to be so moody?!” My exasperated mother would frequently cry.

She had a point. Throughout my life, my emotions have vacillated a thousand times a day. ‘Normal’ has never been my reality. I am a person of extremes. On an ordinary day, tears will rise, unbidden, to my eyes; tears of joy, tears of anger, tears of sadness or frustration. Living near to the ocean, I am familiar with its constant changes, the ebb and flow of its tides. That is exactly how my emotions work. They rise and fall like the traces on a heart monitor. More than that-they blend, separate, re-form. Maturity and self-awareness have helped me to find equilibrium, but it will never come easily.

I am an empath.

Are you made the same way?

We see beauty in ugliness, joy in misery, and poetry in the mundane. Nuances, sly glances, the non-verbal vocabulary, so often overlooked by most people, to us are vivid.

On a bus or train, I stare at people. It’s a compulsion because where others see features, a nose or a mouth; where they assess clothes and accessories and sartorial elegance, I see a spirit. A soul. I’m trying to assess them authentically; who they really are, what makes them tick, what their hopes are, their dreams, what they feel, think, dream of, want. Every person has a story. Every living thing has a tale to tell. As a writer I long to record them. I am in love with the craziness and chaos. The beauty of my surroundings.

Children fascinate me. They are tiny, vast receptacles filled with hope and unwritten potential. The exhausted, dark-circled eyes of their parents blandly acknowledge me, while I see their pride, the sheer, determined, relentless effort they put into raising their children, the love and hope that fuel their willingness to do the impossible every single day.

There’s a prism in every raindrop, a world in every grain of sand. My mind fizzes and buzzes; I am never bored.

Crowds and rooms full of strangers can literally take my breath away. I assimilate them, feeling the silent heartbeats, the pop, snap and crackle of their life force, saturating the atmosphere. At its worst it can trigger a migraine. At its best, I am filled with a sense of pure bliss.

For empaths, other people’s pain is distressing. Injustice and cruelty, affecting any living thing can move us profoundly. Not just from shared sadness but from frustration at our inability to take away the pain; to comfort and find a ‘cure,’ a solution. Other people’s pessimism and negativity can make us physically ill. Sponge-like, we absorb the vibrations until, like a drowning victim, we struggle to stay afloat; to survive. Sometimes, we have no choice but to remove ourselves from their toxicity.

Yet, no matter how badly someone else behaves, we can usually find a rationale. We want to comprehend why. Oh I don’t mean we ought to excuse it or allow it to continue, though I know I once had ‘doormat’ stamped on my forehead. An optimist, I still believe, deep down, that people, for the most part, are intrinsically good. Sometimes naïve, misinformed, lazy, desperate or badly taught, but still…fundamentally good.

An empath will see the heart in the coldness, the essence in the ignorant, the joy in the sadness, the beauty in the vile.

The cultivation of a sense of humour, the ability to find the absurd in the everyday, is vital. You can see that to be an empath can be a wonderful thing…or a nightmare.

Compassion and empathy are invaluable at any time and are essential these days. The modern ‘developed’ world celebrates the atavistic, the shallow, the trivial, the self-serving. We are bombarded daily by a money and ego-fed media making idols of the greedy and the terminally vain. We’re berated to think about number one, to seek ‘success’ in superficial, economic terms while letting the best in us, our humanity, starve and die.

In such times, as empaths, we may suffer greatly; but this crazy, broken world needs us.

More than ever.

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