Ten Years Gone

I'm sad and lonely today.

BG talked about empathy in a heartfelt post the other day, and I sympathize -- I'm so empathic that I bleed buckets. Not literally, but I'm totally hit by other people's emotional responses, and they resonate with me. It's hard to be an emotional beacon like that -- good in that in good emotional situations, it can be a joyous thing; but in bad ones, christ, it hurts.

I quit my last job (this was back in 1999), because I got an ulcer from working with a boss who was juggling three different antidepressants and was busy being manic-depressive and going quite literally out of her mind. Anyway, that vibe crushed and devastated me during the seemingly eternal 1.5 or 2 years I worked there. It was emotional agony -- the first night after my first day there, I laid in bed awake and stared at the ceiling and said "I think I just made a horrible mistake." And I was right. I left that job without having another one lined up, and sort of detoxed from it for six months, eating up savings and being unemployed until I had to find a job again. I wrote a book during that time (had nothing to do with the crazy boss; I just wanted to make good use of the time), my first one -- I still have the draft, and posted the opening lines to it awhile ago.

I got a stomach ulcer from that crazyboss situation, and had to take medication for it, and never entirely recovered. That is, I'm always aware that it can come back -- it has, from time to time. And the pain of a stomach ulcer is quite different from heartburn; ulcers hurt!

Since then, I've forced myself to try (not always with success) not to let my own empathy eat me up inside, while at the same time trying not to be emotionally distant. I mean, it's not like I can even be emotionally distant.

Everyone who knows me knows that I wear my heart right on my lapel (forget the sleeve -- I wear my heart as a boutonniere) -- and I feel vulnerable because of that. I'm glad that I'm sensitive to how other people are feeling; I think it's integral to the creative process -- you can't be insensitive and be artistic, I don't think.

But it also hurts. Today, I hurt.