Tag: empath | A Banana Peeled

In the last post, I talked about the secret to small talk. It’s pretty simple–listen to what the other person is saying and build on it. I say it’s simple, but it’s much more difficult to execute effectively, apparently. I say apparently because it’s second nature to me by now, but other people act as if it’s a completely foreign idea.

This is also a great way to make it seem like you’re interested in a person when you’re not. In otherwords, coworkers or other guests at a party. I’m an introvert. I do not like being around a lot of other people. Talking about THEM is a way to put me at ease because the focus is off me.

I don’t know when I realized that people were desperate to talk about themselves. For someone who would truly listen to them. Not wait for their turn to speak, barely paying attention to what was being said. But actually listening. With all of their attention.

When I was in college, I had a female friend who complained to me that all the guys liked me. There were a ton of things wrong with me back in those days, but one asset I had then is one I still have now. “It’s because I treat them like human beings,” I told her. This is the same friend who, when she had a crush on a guy, memorized his class schedule and made sure to be outside each class after it was over so she could ‘accidentally’ run into him.

I was so snotty back then, and I was very invested in being a ‘cool girl’. I looked down on the other women for being into frivolous things like makeup and clothes, but I didn’t realize that my tenuous place in the boys’ club was predicated on me acting like them. If I dared to slip and be ‘feminine’, I would have quickly been kicked out of the club.

Which, well, that’s messed up in all kinds of way. I had no interest in typically feminine things, but I shouldn’t have felt pressured to look down on them, either. There’s nothing wrong with caring about those things. On the third hand, though, there’s no reason for them to look down on me as well for not liking those things.

Resists impulse to go into a thousand-word screed about performative gender roles.

This is one of the reasons I started questioning my gender, damn it! I have been told I’m not a real woman for: not wanting children, not caring about makeup or fashion, liking sex, imagining having sex with strangers, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I had a taiji class yesterday in which we did the whole Solo Form for the first time in…months? I think maybe since the whole pandemic started. The focus was on making sure that the knees weren’t locked, and by doing that, I didn’t get the backache I normally get. I was elated, and then, ten minutes after class ended (which was right after the Solo Form), I was hit with a blinding pain in my head. A migraine of epic proportion, and without warning. I mean, I’ve been having pre-migraine symptoms for a week, and I’ve been judiciously taking migraine pills, but I wasn’t feeling migraine-y before class. I don’t think I took pills yesterday morning (I’m trying not to overdo), but I certainly popped them after the pain.

The problem is that if I catch the migraine in time, then I’m fine with a very low level of nausea, pain, etc. If I don’t catch it before it’s full-fledged, then it’s bad days. Nausea, head pain, sensitivity to stimuli (more than usual), and general exhaustion. I popped two more pills this morning (two a day is the limit), but I’m still feeling the pain. It’s not as bad as it was yesterday while I was trying to tough it out, but it’s not as little as it would have been had I caught it in time.

I don’t want to say it’s the full Solo Form that triggered the migraine because one, I don’t believe it’s true. Two, I’ve been feeling pre-migrainey all week, so even if it was the event that popped the migraine, there was plenty of buildup to it. I don’t know what it is. Maybe the new foods I’m trying? They’re plant-based Italian sausage and plant-based whipped cream, so maybe there’s something in them that is a trigger. I’ve given up caffeine so it’s not that. Not eating much chocolate, either. Have added more fruits, though. At any rate, now, nearly 24 hours after the explosion, it’s finally starting to abate. A bit.

Veering sharply to another topic, there’s a post on Ask A Manager about an employee who cries all the time and feels everything deeply, sometimes even more so than the person she’s feeling for. The person writing in was her employer, and the employer wrote that the employee was a ‘self-described empath’. That set off people in the comments about how anyone who called themselves empaths were emotional vampires. And I sighed deep in my soul because of all the misconceptions. someone else likened it to vegans in which there were the loud self-proclaimed VEGANS and then there were vegans who just went about their lives and quietly ate their vegan food.

That person wasn’t far from wrong, nor was the person who said that the healthy empaths didn’t necessarily go around talking about it or calling themselves empaths. Nor the person who said that healthy empaths were often sought after because of their listening ear, and then burned out from being empathetic. I am an empath, and I don’t talk about it at all these days. It’s one reason I limit my interaction with other people because I can’t dheal with the negativity, even though it’s gotten better since I started taking taiji.

Tag Archives: empath

Off-the-charts EQ

A little of this and a lot of that