so our therapist thinks I might have too much empathy, and that it might cause me anxiety because I take on other people's emotions.

I always thought I was special. but I'm also a social scientist and so I know from research evidence that most people often think they are special. so I rationalised my feeling special as normal. 

but if she is right - and I do seem to have some 'symptoms' of excessive empathy - then my superpower is real. it might explain my heightened intuition, my ability to read other people's minds (which I earlier thought everyone could but have lately started to realize the contrary).

from a lot of my reading I had understood that low empathy was often the result of the spectrum of autistic issues, or a trait of narcissistic personalities. also that humans had uncanny empathy in the animal world; now I am learning that other animals do too. in a way I always thought empathy was a good thing, and that more was better. but apparently too much empathy is something of a borderline personality disorder. (they aren't wrong when they say give therapy enough time to find a disorder with anyone, because after all 'normal' is just the average across us all). it is because feeling other people's pain and emotions more than is 'normal' can be inefficient for one's own mind, like taking on more burdens than u need. but it's not only possibly bad for one, it can also hurt others because one puts oneself in their spots too much and attributes to them the extent and depth of feeling one feels herself, which might be an over/under estimation; effectively one cannot have the same information as other people about their situation, so one's empathising with them can often be a misjudgement. and using that in one's interaction with them can often create a mess, even hurting them.

this might explain why I have felt misunderstood often in my relationships, and have had expectations from other people that they don't deliver on (other people possibly have less empathy than I expected of them), which not only disappoints me but angers me sometimes, and gives me a feeling of superiority that again feels misunderstood.

I do still feel it doesn't cause me anxiety, because an out of body experience does accompany my empathy. 

a long friend/acquaintance recently lost her husband. I was getting news about his condition from another source as she didn't always feel like communicating when he was in hospital, so I had feared already. when I finally heard from the third person, I felt a physical wave of dread pass through my body, and I still kept wishing there was some confusion about the identity of the person being referred to. I didn't reach out to her because I felt like she wasn't ready, I mean if I was in denial I should respect hers. later I did meet her and also asked my therapist for a grief counsellor for her because I learned from K's colleagues that she had tweeted about it, and because the next few days I found her trying to use social media to come to terms with it, which worried me because I felt it was the wrong place to look for solace.

my therapist worries too much about me, I feel she has grown fond of me. she thinks the demise made me anxious, but frankly it was the use of social media that partly did, and partly it was because her family couldn't travel to her in these times and I was the only one amongst us friends who was within driving distance and thus able to get to her; I was anxious because I wanted to help but didn't know how, especially because I have always found her to be a difficult person and I have never felt close to her, especially because I wanted to meet her in a covid-safe way and she insisted I come into her home because their quarantine was over (she did come down later). I understand that her pain her grief is hers to bear, I understand that I may feel her situation slightly more than would be felt by someone else at my distance, and not just because I listened to her that day, I understand that my feeling that she needs to meet her parents asap is not shared by her and might not be the best advice even though I feel it is. I also understand that many things she said I will never share with anyone but K and maybe my therapist, and that I judged even some of them silently; but all this doesn't cause me anxiety and in fact it might have helped me help her.

too much of anything can be unwanted and inefficient and unbalanced. but it can also be a superpower. and it can be both good and bad. if the therapist is right it might be why I've often found economics and game theory to be so intuitive and natural. it might be why I was the only one to realize that a couple's lesbian au pair had a thing for the guy even before it came out. K didn't believe me then cos of her sexual orientation, even though I insisted that is never absolute, and that most people are somewhere on the spectrum of being bisexual, that the person you feel attracted toward matters more than their gender. it probably explains why, soon after meeting a classmate after years wherein she talked about issues with her husband about her career choices, when I saw she had a new haircut had gotten a new look more like a complete makeover, I knew that she had decided to end her marriage.

my web reading of excessive empathy also tells me that it is often not innate but learned. I think it's all the reading, and even the movies about human emotions. I cry and hurt easily when I read or step into a character or a being, but I've found myself doing more and more of it (I've written before about not knowing another way to live or be). slowly I'm also losing fear of the animals that used to frighten me, and tuning more into their selves.

I realize yet again that I was wrong about some conclusions I drew. I am reading Carl Safina's Becoming Wild. and I learn, not surprisingly, that the evolutionary rift from reptiles that branched out to result in mammals and birds happened such that birds are one terminal node and we another. Mammals are thus not more evolved than birds, and the reason we think that is due to our ego, our ignorance, and our religious-cultural belief system. so think before u say 'bird-brained' again; birds understand probability, and are capable of making hooked and pronged tools that involve multiple stages of construction. 

homicide therefore is not and should not be more horrifying than the murder of many other life forms we routinely commit. If it's for food I can still condone it as that is natural and part of the cycle of ecosystems, but factory style mass killing is very inhumane (yes that is an old realisation).

I didn't know for example that early whaling in humans was to reduce those majestic bulks of gorgeous mammals to whale oil to lubricate our industrialising lives, and later as we found fossil fuels we started using whale meat to mass manufacture dog and cat food!!!!!! (ugh)

whales and dolphins have sophisticated language, and possibly so do birds and fish. just because we don't hear or understand them doesn't mean we have proof to the contrary. 

the other day I decided that the dog food (just a couple of jumbones in a sealed pack) lying in our car needed to be consumed if it didn't go bad as we are using our car a lot less due to lockdown and not coming back from late night dining at all (the original need to distract dogs guarding our staircase). So I brought it home and took it with me when I went shopping for fruit and vegs from our block thela, thinking that I might spot Beauty and Whiskey and give them one each. My luck then that Beauty was snoozing on the stairs just as I got out. I spoke to her, telling her how I'd been looking exactly for her. and despite her sleepiness I gave her one. She started licking it and got busy and I carried on. I walked around calling out for Whiskey but not finding him gave the second one to an unknown dog who looked like he could do with a treat. the next morning on my return from my run, Whiskey, who was sleeping or yawning and stretching under a car (at that hour a number of dogs are unresponsive), suddenly crawled out and came toward me and kept sniffing my hands expectantly. I caressed his face and ears and rubbed his side lovingly and spoke to him, telling him that I was looking for him the day before and that I didn't have it with me anymore. I wonder what Beauty had told him.

Barbets call all day, and now I realize I've known these sounds for a while without knowing their source, the birds. when I run in the morning in my block these days, almost every lane has a barbet calling. and now I'm even seeing their perfect tree holes - apparently barbets have woodpecker-strong beaks and burrow into the wood of trunks. there are two species around here. the smaller mouse-like coppersmiths (their call is like a coppersmith repeatedly beating a sheet of metal) are more visible because they like to sun themselves while calling on the top leafless branches of the mother tree; and their red heads and chests can catch your attention. the larger, the brown-headed barbet blends with the green leaves of summer, unless u see one flying from one branch to another like a leaf falling and then on focusing you notice it leading you to another perfect tree hole, it's grotesque large head and beak kinda cartoonish. it's call is also more nuanced, like a trrrr kutrro kutrroo.

and y'day outside the vaccination center - a public school in the maze of narrow pothole ridden lanes that can barely support the two-way traffic that flows through them and that seem like they are made of cowdung and irregular stones and rain water rather than tar - I saw a clan of sparrows. when we were kids there were sparrows everywhere and I didn't know what a barbet was.

Apparently there is a need to document what we are witnessing. The govt's mistakes, it's current callousness, it's single minded effort to deny, deflect, lie, and stifle criticism, even at the cost to more human lives, and to still put it's political image and the varnishing of it above stemming the pandemic, tantamount to murder.

But what's the point even in that really. Those who see the lies, they were the only ones who wanted to see them. Others close their ears, their eyes, their minds and refuse information that contradicts their beliefs. Or they euphemize the lies to "an inability to accept mistakes", which they say "I can forgive". 

The liar has thus been emboldened over the last two decades, and the people suffer, and die, and are not even counted.

I think I have trouble being tied down. having an employer. funny me saying this after getting a job after nearly four years. 

most people thought I wouldn't be able to find employment again; some thought I wanted domesticity or motherhood instead. barely anyone understood and everyone offered advice.

yes I had trouble finding employment, but that's because the Indian education system is messed up and nearly impossible to reason with. but somehow I found a loophole to their obduracy. and this year I have multiple offers. 

you got engaged to a Shira, and then you realise you are attracted to a different Shira ( watch Shtisel for context); that's how I feel now. having committed to the safest most practical option (the one that came first, hah), the one that even when committing to I felt like it was the wrong but risk averse decision, I now feel I erred. 

I feel my nature is to take risks and after earning some grey hairs I thought my nature had changed, but no, "one is still what one is going to cease to be...."

plus for the very first time, since the start of the pandemic, I had begun to reconcile myself to remaining on in my own country. and now I get an opportunity for a brief stint outside, but my commitment and the lack of consideration of my fiance (employment wise) prevents me from accepting it. the irony that is life. you live you learn, shit happens, and you're helpless, and you realise life and death and health are more important (but even those are location-dependent).

people are dying in homes, in cars and autos waiting for hospitals to take them in, in hospitals when they run out of oxygen or when there's a fire. the world feels unreal around me, especially when each one of us is affected/afflicted. 

but then I see this woman I met years ago in Europe, much younger than me, in a photo posted by her after many months, 39 weeks pregnant and "waiting to bring a new person into this beautiful world", and I wonder if she is living in the same world as me. and I realise in fact that she isn't, that this world has always been divided, that each is separated and isolated from the other despite our 'porous borders', that now I am in that world from where the rest looks insensitive because where I am is the source of the horror news headlines; that I have been on the other side of this often before when I have read about news from Syria, or Latin America, even the USA, ...