Empathy and emotional intensity

First, if you have not yet read @celestal's post entitled I don't know..., go do it now, and if you were going to vote my post, upvote that one instead. This post started life as a comment on that post, but it was getting pretty long so I decided to break it out into a post of my own.

_{(So begins my evil plot to discover who votes without reading... heheheh.)}

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_{Adapted from this image by Joe Goldberg on Flickr. CC-BY-SA 2.0.}

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In that post, @celestal states...

_{What I mostly miss from the trip, is probably the emotional intensity that it evoked, one way or the other. I mean, negative emotions aren't nice, but usually I was quickly able to shift them by being (at least somewhat) fearless, doubtful, non-biased towards them [...] I guess what I'm saying is, my soul feeds off emotion, or maybe by expressing it [...]}

As I laid in bed a few nights ago trying to burn off some VP before sleeping, this stopped me in my tracks! I recognised a concept I could so closely identify with, so eloquently expressed in someone else's words.

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I have been getting in touch with my emotions a lot recently. For quite some time now I have been mostly content, I guess, but unfulfilled. I was focused on my own narrow view of life, just riding the lifestyle escalator and hopefully one day I would have enough money and things to be happy. But there was something I was missing. Life felt flat somehow. Like sure, things were fine; things were goooood... but what was the point?

So I made a change, subconsciously I think. In general, I have opened my heart to feeling more things. One of the most profound changes is that I have fully embraced empathy and the "negative" emotions that so often come with it. I don't exactly know when it started or how long it took, but I remember vividly the moment it finally "took hold" and I realised what was happening to me.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a particularly touching video about someone else's life and how some bad things had happened and even more are coming. It had nothing to do with me and I didn't even really have a strong reason to relate as her life has very little in common with mine. But as she told the story of her loss and what she stood to lose in the future, and showed what had already happened, I just broke down. I was crying like I hadn't in years. I had zero control over my body. My eyes and my lungs and my vocal cords were doing their own damn thing. (I can feel a couple more tears sneaking out silently as I think about it. Yep... there they go.)

I was feeling her pain.

I was feeling her pain.

I was feeling her pain.

As lame or as pathetic as it may sound to the reader, I freely admit that watching that video was one of my most fulfilling emotional experiences, ever, in my life. I may have been lying in bed on a lazy afternoon, staring at my phone... but in that moment I felt as if I had never, ever felt so alive. It did not bring me joy; there was no joy in it, in fact there was abject sadness, but if sadness by definition must be displeasing then instead this was some uncharted emotion I do not have the vocabulary to express.

It was fulfilling. It made me feel whole somehow; more human. It was painful, but this was a pain I would wish on not only my worst enemy but also my closest and dearest friends. I would wish it on the whole world, and not only because maybe then we would learn something. Not just because maybe then, we would stop being so cold and selfish and numb about everything and actually think of the consequences our actions have. I would wish it on the world because I want everyone, everywhere, to experience the feeling of wholeness and connection with a complete stranger that I did in that moment.

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@celestal's discussion of "emotional intensity" resonated so perfectly with how I have been feeling lately. It seems to me that if I had to nail down one specific thing that has happened to me overall, it is that somehow, that "emotional intensity" dial got turned all the way up to 11... and this has manifested in all of my emotional dimensions.

Joy and love and excitement; empathy and profound sadness and loneliness; bitterness and anger; fear and despair and hope and everything every which way in between. All of these things and more, I have been feeling more intensely than ever and I am just so grateful for it; words just cannot express this level of gratitude. I have been crying a hell of a lot... and I've never felt more alive. 🍋