I am going to take a stab at one of my recurring fascinations : the sense of responsibility one feels towards others.

I was prompted to write about this by the realization that what I always took to be my overwhelming sense of total responsibility for the reasonably foreseeable consequence of my actions is actually merely a rational label for something far deeper and stronger than mere consciousness can understand.

I chalk it up to what I will call my sensitivity. You could also call it, empathy, my intuition, my “feelers”, or even my skill at reading subconscious cues from  others.

But I am going to call it my sensitivity because it’s simplest. Most people have some idea what it means when you describe someone as “very sensitive”, and brother, I am so goddamned sensitive it’s insane.

Not in a clinical sense. I think.

See, I have always had a very deep feeling for others. And I soak up emotions from my environment very readily and easy. I am fairly sure that I don’t have a choice about that either. The only way to stop it would be to practically lobotomize myself.

And I made the decision long ago that I would rather stay sensitive and suffer than become hard and insensitive and isolated.

My id is not real happy about that.

That means that I have a lot of inputs that some people do not. I think that’s one contributing factor to my tendency to be confused. At any moment I am around others, I am getting empathic input that is very intense and it distracts me from what is happening in the world outside my head.

The fact that I turned myself into this hyper-rational left-brained dude made things worse because people like me instinctively filter out a lot of the messages our emotions (and instincts, and memories, and so on) are trying to tell us. We do this because we take comfort in the rational and sensible and this want to preserve our calm, rational frame of mind. When our emotions run wild, we tend to panic because we no longer feel in control.

This makes a lot of us to declare that emotions are the enemy. Hence all that Spock bullshit. So we build this wall between our supposedly “rational” mind and our real time emotional world, and proceed as though by ignoring emotions, one can be rid of them.

The catch-22 being that you are never more helpless against your emotions than when you ignore them. We end up doing a lot of irrational things then making up rationales later in order to preserve our delusions of order and rationality.

And that, until recently, describe me to a T. The futility of such a posture and the need to open up the other half of my brain and invite it to the table of consciousness is a relatively recent innovation for me. I wasted a long time with that rationalist bullshit.

But eventually I came to realize that the cold inside my soul was self-generated and that to only thing that could free me from my icy tomb was the pure warm light of the Sun, and in order to get that, I would have to stop ignoring empathic input and let the sun shine in.

I won’t insult you by pretending I had a choice whether to link that song.

Cue the end of Wizard of Oz, because it turned out that I had the power to fix myself all along. I was simply ignoring it. The wall of ice I constructed in order to stay “rational” and “in control” was the very thing killing me inside. My only salvation lay in unfreezing those old emotions and dealing with them, and thus raise the temperature inside me.

All of that is a very long route towards talking about my feeling of connection to others.The sort of sensitivity I am talking about makes it tricky to remember where you end and others begin. Thus my somewhat flexible sense of self. It’s an absolute necessity if you are to survive experiencing the emotions of others so intensely.

And for a long time, I mistook this sense of connection for my sense of total responsibility. This responsibility, after all, was something I had arrived at rationally. To me, it is the only logically supportable position, as onerous as it is.

But it’s more than that. It’s the feeling of being contiguous with others, with no hard and clear boundary line between myself and others. I think that accounts for a lot of my more unusual fears and odd reactions. I am terrified that I will lose myself in this sea of empathy and loss of self is, of course, the true definition of death.

So in that sense, I am afraid to die.

And I think that this connection to others informs my deep sense of responsibility. I am all too keenly aware of how people can hurt one another and empathy makes it so that when others are hurt. I hurt, and when others are happy, I am happy. So the last thing I want to do is hurt people. I would only be hurting myself.

Well, them too, I guess.

Thing is, sometimes in life, you have to hurt people. In fact, hurting someone might very well the moral thing to do, given certain situations. In this hardscrabble life, there will be times that in order to preserve and express your sense of self, you have to be willing to kick kneecaps and step on toes in order to assert your right to exist.

That’s why healthy people don’t have this sense of total responsibility and total empathy. It’s not healthy. There has to be some kind of boundary between you and others in order to have any sense of self at all.

And your self is the foundation for the rest of your psyche.

I am not sure how to set up these boundaries, but I have a feeling it involves deciding when it is okay to stop caring.

And I am not sure I can do that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.