Being an Empath

What does it mean to be empathetic? The dictionary says, "showing an ability to understand and share the feelings of another." You are most likely a caring and loving person, someone people come to in times of trouble because they know you will understand them and stick by their side.

For some, empathy means more. It means absorbing people's emotions like a sponge, being highly sensitive to other people's feelings as well as your own. For me, this description better suits the way I feel around people. This is why I call myself an empath. Unlike generally empathetic people, empaths take on other people's emotions as their own.

When I started high school, almost everyone was on edge — hundreds of 13-year-olds desperate to fit in, to prove themselves as alpha. I, along with many other people, had a hard time finding my group of people — people who could understand me, people who were similar to me.

This caused a lot of stress in my 13-year-old life. I had panic attacks almost every day, thinking everyone was staring at me, judging me. To make myself stick out, I started telling friends what I really thought about people. I was soon dubbed the weird girl because I had an uncanny ability to read people. I could look at a person and tell them who they really were and why they acted certain ways. I would watch people and almost become them, feeling their emotions and copying their physicalities. My mum would constantly tell me that I was becoming like my friends. High school went on, I found my people, and I sort of left behind the weird girl who was popular for knowing the real you.

During my last years of high school, I watched a film about a couple who got AIDS and died after being together for 13 years. It was a true story and it hit me like a bullet train of emotions. After watching the film at random intervals for almost a month, I would burst into tears, remembering what that pain must have been like, losing your loved one to something you gave to them, having no control over life and death. It was as if I had aged 20 years, become a gay man and lost the love of my life, even though I was a 17-year-old girl with no partner.

Movies and books started to make me cry more than usual and every time I was reminded of those dead characters or sad moments I would again feel a pang in my chest. A little reminder of pain. I blamed this on good film-making and writing and thought nothing of it. It wasn't until real people that I knew started coming to me with problems. I started to take them on as my own. I have a family friend who had been a victim of domestic violence this year and when it was revealed to my family all the horror stories and shit they had gone through, I was shocked.

That night, I locked myself in my room, away from all the people in my house and bawled my eyes out. My house was full of injured and hurt people all emitting their feelings of anger and sadness and it made me feel as if I had been rained on by a cloud of crying voices. It was as if people were screaming in my head but there was nothing I could do. As someone prone to panic attacks and depressive and destructive episodes, I went to the internet for some quick counselling before any of these things occurred. This is where I came across a page about empaths.

Highly sensitive, highly intuitive, highly tuned senses, need alone time? You may be an empath. It was like someone took what I thought as my worst qualities and wrote them down. To me, these things brought me down. These qualities got me called names like drama queen, copy cat, or cry baby, when in fact I was just someone who saw through people's outer exterior and into their souls and felt exactly what they were feeling.

Being an empath isn't something to hate about yourself. It isn't something that you should try and conceal or hide because it will just make it worse. It's something you can harness to help better understand society. It's a tool to direct towards yourself to explore your needs and abilities to help and heal others around you as well as yourself. Before you save the world, protect yourself, learn to shield your open heart to the world in times of hardship, and learn to open it in times of positivity.