Or maybe that should be “the feelers”, or antennae.
I got onto the subject of empathy by way of one of those “when was your gut feeling about someone right?” Reddit videos I am so fond of.
Being a strongly intuitive rational materialist, those things appeal to me.
Like I said in the comments, I use my empathy and/or intuition (my “gut feelings”) to give me leads about people. If I have a bad gut feeling about someone, I then investigate the people to see if it’s right about them.
It usually is.
And I am quite good at sussing people out. I can ask perfectly innocuous sounding questions that will nevertheless tell me a lot about someone just by how they react.
Man, I really am creepy.
Oh well, this is the soul I got so that’s the person I am.
C’est la vie.
Being science minded. I sometimes wonder what, exactly, it is I am picking up from people. What could be traveling between them and me?
To me, it feels electromagnetic. Like my nervous system acts as a receiver for some kind of broadcast from other people’s nerves.
And that’s not completely ridiculous, but it’s not too likely. The amount of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the live electrical system that is our nervous system is pretty small so that “antennae would have to be quite sensitive in order to pick up that transmission.
But like I said, not impossible.
My only other idea is pheromones. And those seem even less likely.
I am sure there is a whole galaxy of things we don’t know about how pheromones work and how they affect our minds and our moods. Indeed, they could be the source of the very “bad gut feelings” I mentioned above.
And they must surely be how dogs sense our moods. And be why I sometimes get a bad feeling about places, too.
There were houses I delivered papers to where I am sure some bad shit was going down. But you can’t very well call the cops based on a bad vibe.
But my experience of empathy is too immediate and dense with information to be something that wafts over to me whenever.
Pheromones are definitely part of the equation but they can’t be the whole thing.
And with that I am out of theories. The fact that my empathy reflects people’s real emotions is attested to by the very “creepy” things I mentioned in the vid.
I would not have been able to freak out my siblings by casually mentioning things I saw in their heads if my strong empathic powers were delusional.
And of course, my own subjective experience is really all I need. Like I said in the vid, other people’s emotions are just there for me.
I suppose I could have followed some career path based on my empathy. That’s basically what I would have been doing had my life gone as planned and I would have become a practicing psychologist.
I really want to help people, and with my natural abilities augmented by a college degree plus whatever other education I’d need, I would have been a very good one.
But my parents wanted early retirement instead. Fucking Boomers.
I suppose I could try to become one now. The psych courses would be a breeze for me and my aptitude for the subject would be more than evident.
My handicap would make things tricky. Probably best to take the courses online.
It’s a possibility I shall ponder. Spending my days helping people with their darkness and their demons by shedding some light into their worlds sounds so good to me.
And talk about good karma!
More after the break.
Ooh pretty horsie!
I made this here in Vida and I love how it turned out, so here it is!
I’m jealous of both of them. 🙂
The spooks in the shadows
Got that “haunted” feeling again.
Oh well, whatever. Shit happens. Excrement occurs. Sometimes I feel spooked and strange and alienated for no apparent reason. Big deal.
A mind as powerful and unique as mine is bound to have some eccentricities.
It could be sundowning. That’s something people at eldercare facilities discovered about the elder they care for that some of them are fine all day but when the sun goes down they become fearful and/or difficult and/or just plain nuts.
Same thing happens in mental health wards too.
And I have noticed that a change comes over me when the sun comes down lately. And it seems to match sundowning. I feel twitchy and nervous and spooked. I feel like I am one sudden loud noise from shrieking hysteria.
That might do me some good, come to think of it. Blow through a bunch of latent emotions all at once. Clear out the cobwebs.
But I am too damned stable for that.
Sad. But stable.
So I just trudge along my therapeutic path like I’m a tortoise hoping to outrun a particularly stupid hare.
Only in my case the hare is death.
The truth is that I am unwilling to abandon the safety of stability for the potential of renewal. I fear the chaos that lies in the darkness of my mind too much for that, and I have no faith that things can be okay unless I consciously and logically make them OK.
I’m too old and broken and poor to go off on any sort of life adventure where I get to find out who I really am by dealing with novel situations that teach me to rely upon myself.
The only way that’s going to happen is if I’m rich, or marry someone that is. Traveling when you’re disabled pretty much requires assistance that ain’t gonna come cheap.
Though from what I have seen, people are quite nice to us cripples. So there’s that.
Still, I rather like the idea of traveling in the lap of luxury, with porters to carry things and fancy little staircases to help me get in and out of vehicles and a handsome nurse/assistant to keep me alive and happy.
I could see the world if I had that.
But I kind of need to get rich first.
I’m working on it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.