The Many Faces of Empathy

I used to laugh louder. I would throw my head back and cackle at a joke I’d heard twenty times with not a thought about the sound of my laugh, my double chin or if I was being annoying.

Everything used to move me; the same hummingbirds gathering in my grandma’s garden every morning, an old man sitting in a park with no book, no phone and no companion, just his thoughts and the view in front of him… the news of somebody I’d never even met passing away, the sight of two people reuniting after a long time apart, the sound of a string quartet, the touch of an old, wrinkled hand or the taste of angel food cake covered in strawberries. These could all at one point in my life cover my body in goosebumps. I read once, “you cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness” and it reminded me that around the time all of my difficult experiences stopped feeling nearly as painful, nothing moved me anymore either.

Now every once in a while, I read a line in a book that stops me in my tracks and I reread it until the words stop looking like real words. When I listen to someone as they tell me something tragic, I search their eyes for whether or not their own story still moves them, if their words still feel like real words.

Jokes eventually get less funny. Alone time in the park eventually gets boring. Hummingbirds (and the old woman who put sugar in their feeders) eventually die. And words eventually stop looking like real words when you reread them too many times. I didn’t notice that cynicism had moved into my body until its bags were unpacked and suddenly I was pretending to cry at funerals so I looked as sad as everybody else. We’re all going to die, I’d think to myself, Why do we keep crying over and over again about death? I grieved loved ones by curling inside of myself, wilting into journals and outwardly not feeling anything at all. I didn’t notice I was protecting myself from happiness until my friends started asking permission to hug me and people looked at me with an expression that screamed, Are you even sad?

Something I’ve grown to appreciate now is that people know I won’t cry with them, yet they still come to me for comforting words. Despite the fact that the act of hugging sometimes makes my skin crawl, people love me enough to want to embrace me. I laugh with my husband like I’ve never laughed before because my dark sense of humor amuses him. I’m not actually that cynical at all. I’m just vulnerable differently.  

We don’t have to show empathy or be moved in the same way as anybody else.