Empathy: A Boon Or A Bane?

Why do things go wrong exactly where they were supposed to go right?

Okay, let us start with how I’m doing. I had no full fledged anxiety attacks for the past two weeks. My content writing internship has started. It is going pretty good. I love the work (except for the part where the senior content writer gives me plagiarized work that needs to be rephrased). I genuinely enjoy learning how to create a variety of content and the work keeps me engaged all day, morning till evening.

However, I would be lying in saying that it has not been challenging for me. At times, the fear of failure can have a larger impact than you might want to let it. There have been times in these one and a half weeks where I have felt certain kinds of content were impossible for me to produce, given my academic background in as stagnant a subject as economics. However, I wasn’t ready to let that fear ruin such a beautiful opportunity for me. I kept typing for an hour with my hands trembling and my heart in my throat. But you know what, it passed. It went away! That was such a victory for me. I did finish my work and it felt amazingly freeing.

That is all from my personal diary for now. Let us take a look at how things have been outside of the world inside my head.

The only positive of what I’ve been through is that I now do not judge people at all. Whenever I talk to someone, be it friends, family or even a new person, it just hits me that this person might also be suffering, might be in agony, might be hiding it deep down inside them. I have just one thought, “help them”.

You might be thinking, “oh, that’s so selfless of her!” Or, “how dumb is she?” It isn’t any of that. It is empathy that has been growing into a humongous giant inside of me. 

When you go through depression or anxiety or any mental state where you have constant fear that it may consume you any day, and that day might be the last you have to survive, things do change. You just cannot ignore people for who they are anymore. You cannot ignore their sufferings, you internalize them. You put yourself in their shoes and start feeling their pain. You want them not to go through the things you have been facing, you want them to heal, to be happy.

Thus began my journey of trying to help people. If you are a friend, I’ll be there. If you are family, I’ll be there. If you are a stranger and you are going through a hard time, I will still try and help you because I myself cannot help helping people anymore. I asked my therapist whether this can affect my personal healing process. I did not expect she would end up saying what she did. 

My therapist suggested that these feelings of empathy will only help me heal faster and in more ways than otherwise possible. I’ll learn how to heal from people that I help heal. She said very few people can actually be an empath, people can just have sympathy for you at most. If you are an empath, you’ll touch more lives than you can ever imagine. But is it always good to be able to feel so much pain? I do not know and I am not so sure I would want to any time soon.

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