Slippery When Wet

Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to just feel nothing—not physically (but I think you gathered that already), but emotionally. It’s always seen as such a negative trait: cold, heartless, unfeeling. I’m not saying that any of those things are positive by any means, but, sometimes, I think I just need to be more rational.

In one of my classes, we recently took a “StrengthFinder (2.0!)” test, and one of my strongest traits was empathy. I wasn’t surprised by this, really, but I was a little confused about how they defined the term. They seemed to say that being empathic is merely understanding others’ emotions, but not necessarily feeling them. Empathy implies a certain amount of detachment that I’m not sure I’ve mastered. Apparently, to actually feel the emotions is sympathy. So, perhaps I’m more sympathic than empathic (But, then again, “sympathic” isn’t even a real word…and “sympathetic” just doesn’t seem to create the parallelism I had so fervently desired here. Perhaps that means it’s time to move on…).

When I’m completely honest with myself, I know I never would want to lose my sense of em(sym?)pathy. It’s definitely a large part of who I am, and I can’t imagine life without it. All other things aside, I know my writing would suffer tremendously if I were constantly detached from the world around me. I write best when I’m feeling—good or bad (usually bad, actually). Without these feelings, I imagine my writing would look a little something like this:
Mary was sad, and her tears fell to the ground at a velocity of 2 m/s (Yes, Mary has alarmingly fast tears).

So, at least I can take comfort in that, right? Besides, I highly doubt the above sentence would fit very well in any sort of literature…except maybe a physics book. And even that’s a stretch.

I guess my main problem is that I’m just hurt too easily and too deeply—even by trivial things. I overanalyze, and I punish myself for things that I really can’t control. And, then, the negative feelings just fester until I manage to push them aside (to be kept for later use, no doubt).

One good thing I’ve discovered is that I’ve learned to heal myself quickly. No matter how horrible I feel, I can usually pick myself back up again before too long. Even now, I can feel myself bouncing back…like one of those obnoxious little “whack-a-mole” creatures after you’ve clubbed it over the head 50 times, and it simply refuses to die. Okay…maybe not quite like that.

So, what have we learned today? Hmmm…nothing substantial, it seems. I guess our lesson for today—as evidenced by my little writing sample in the third paragraph—is merely that life is more complicated than physics (Note: This may not be true for “Physics 3”…but I will never know for sure because I will never take such a nightmarish class).
And…that’s a wrap.