This little puppy popped up on my screen and asked me if I needed help. I didn't, and so he tucked his tail between his legs, gazed forlornly at me as if I had just banished him outside, and slunk off the screen.
Now, it's not as if I cried, or anything. But I did get a little hitch in my chest. I wanted to tell the puppy that he could come back and stay on my screen as long as he didn't get in the way of my typing. Maybe wag his tail every now and again. Look at me with a little happiness in his eyes.
The Microsoft Office assistants have been mocked, parodied, and called "one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing" by Smithsonian magazine. And all I remember about them was banishing the little puppy, and feeling awful doing it.
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A couple of weeks ago, with back-to-school in full swing, the amount of garbage set out to the curb in my neighbourhood suddenly quadrupled, and included all manner of cast off furniture and such. Eva and I watched as two burly sanitation engineers wrestled a queen size boxspring into the back of the garbage truck, which ate it in stages, setting off a cacophony of creaks and groans and snaps. I winced several times and gritted my teeth: I found the noises ugly almost to the point of physical pain.
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More than twenty years ago, I went to visit my best friend, who was living and working in downtown Toronto at the time. I met him for lunch, in the towering atrium lobby of his office building. There were what seemed like thousands of similarly dressed men rushing to and fro like so many rats in a maze. You've heard the saying 'you could cut the air with a knife'? I felt as if I had to use a machete, hacking through thick brambles of tension with every step. The best metaphor I can come up with is a psychic smell, a mental miasma of fear. It was an indescribable relief to get out of that building into the open air.
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I can go on and on with anecdotes like this: rare is the day I don't gain a new one.
I have too much empathy. Way too much. It sits in my gut, ready to give my insides a good rearranging any time someone is in pain around me. The nausea can and does progress to the point of vomiting if the pain is severe enough. I can harden myself against it, if I know it's a long-term thing I can't do anything about, but I feel compelled to do what I can to lessen that pain instead. People think I'm so loving and caring, and I am, but that love and care as a selfish component to it. I want my gut to stop pogoing around my body cavity, okay?
It doesn't matter whether it's a person, an animal, or an inanimate object. If it's being destroyed in some way, I empathize with it. I seem to be incapable of turning that off. God knows I've tried. I've tried because even I recognize those anecdotes above are not indicative of mental health. I can forgive you if you laugh at me for wanting to run away whenever anything explodes, or for getting a little bit misty-eyed at this
"That is because you crazy", indeed.
Over the eleven years I have been writing this blog, I have repeatedly cited Spider Robinson's philosophy, given such high expression in his Callahan's Place novels, that "shared pain is lessened and shared joy is increased; thus do we refute entropy". If I could sum up my mission in life in one sentence, that would be it. That maxim permeates virtually every important interaction I have, both on and off line. I seek out pain, it seems. I never have to seek far to find it: pain is lurking behind so many smiling facades, and so many people have constructed intricate and persuasive personas to mask their pain from themselves and especially from anyone else who might see it and judge them for it.
I don't judge. I feel.
It's why you'll see me always trying to drag people closer to the center of any argument, seeking consensus. Consensus is harmonious; extremism breeds free-floating hatred, which all too often is unleashed on total strangers...wounding me by proxy. It's hard for me to read the kind of vicious, unthinking attacks that pass for 'debate' when you can't see the person you're debating. I don't understand why rudeness and worse is so damned common online: how are the people behind the pixels so easily minimized? The few times I have found myself feeling the kind of intense anger that I see all around me, I've withdrawn completely. I don't want to inflict pain on people whom I know are already hurting.
It's why I love the way I do: because people are loveable. Simple like that. Also because so many people have forgotten they are loveable, and reminding them seems to me like a good thing to do. It might just lessen some of their pain...especially if they choose to share it with me.
It's why I love music so much: because music is universal and heals pain like next to nothing else. Through music, I can share my hurt and you can share yours and somehow we'll end up with less than half a hurt apiece.
It's why I read: because reading expands perspectives, opens you up to different perceptions, and allows you to better understand people and their pain.
Many folks do not believe that shared pain is lessened...they act as if sharing pain just provokes a different sort of pain. I may not be able to heal what's causing your hurt -- I'm only human -- but goddamnit I can do something about that other pain. Expressing your anguish should never cause more anguish...but bottling it up will.
Since I can't seem to turn this empathy off, or even down...I might as well do something constructive with it, no?
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