I am not an empath, and other ways I am (not) coping

Over my lifetime, I've flogged myself and prided myself over my hyper-sensitivity, in equal measure. I hate that it often makes me the odd one out. Hate that it at times has makes me literally physically ill. Hate that it necessitates a list of coping strategies that don't even occur to many. Hate that whatever is neurologically different about me, I can't seem to put it down or choose my way out of it. 

Still, I admit taking a kind of grim satisfaction in being a so-called empath, able to intuit the emotional states and intents of other people, often so correctly it seems like clairvoyance. I may not always like what my emotional antennae are reporting back to my highly anxious cerebral cortex, but it's a kind of darkly beneficial superpower, isn't it? Isn't it?

On Inauguration Day, I was watching the 46th President of the United States take his oath of office. I had live coverage streaming from my personal laptop most of the day, while I sat at my work laptop and attempted to act as though it was a normal day. It wasn't. It already wasn't, like so much of the past year wasn't, like so much of the past four years weren't. I was working from home, on the sofa, with a quilt in my lap, pandemic style. Guarded from harm. 

The Inaugural proceedings were not normal either. The president and vice president took their oaths of office in a capitol on high alert, full of national guards, before a nearly empty venue, with masks and distancing. Guarded from harm. 

On that day, I was a peculiar combination of lighthearted and wildly anxious. I let myself enjoy the assembly of past and present presidents and first ladies. I took in the perfection that was Amanda Gorman's poetry, hair, and vivid gold suit.  I, too, laughed at Bernie's mittens. I noted the symbolism of all that purple (red + blue = purple). I counted how many times Joe said "unity." I considered that this sunny hopeful moment came the day after a memorial service to 400,000+ dead of a pandemic our country has failed to contain. I stood watch for violence that (thankfully) never came. It was a stew of outward hope and relief and inward fear and grief that boiled up into the emotional equivalent of carsickness after a long trip-- I'm glad we're finally here after that long awful ride, but now I need to go throw up. 

I didn't actually "throw up," until the next day. I was again at my work laptop, at the kitchen table, drinking my morning coffee and reading my e-mail, which included some information about the policies and plans of the new Biden-Harris administration. Policies and plans that were common sense. Practical. Inclusive. Humane. Optimistic. Responsible. I don't really remember starting to cry. Just that there were big fat blobby teardrops falling on my forearms, the table, the keyboard. Breath went out of me like stale air exits a house from an opening door. I could feel the muscles that run up my back, neck, and shoulders sag downward, suddenly all out of tension.

Somewhere between the day of fat blobby tears and last weekend, this meme popped up in one of my feeds-- "Babe you're not an empath, you have PTSD from an unstable household, and are sensitive to emotional changes as a defense mechanism." Ouch. 

I grew up where the expectations were that I would be good. Really good and clean and tidy and polite. And quiet. And not cause trouble. Or talk back. Talk, even. In many ways, the relative peace of the household depended on my ability to disappear-- verbally, physically, emotionally. What did that train me for? Withdrawing. I am a special forces-in-camouflage level withdrawer, able to sense impending danger, gather my feelings up tight around me, sink below the radar of community, colleagues, friends, and family, out of their depth and unavailable, sometimes even to myself, for long stretches at a time. Guarded from harm. 

Until I bumped into that meme, I thought I had addressed that part of myself with some reasonable self-awareness, that I'd made a conscious decision to shed that part of my behavior, like it was an ill-fitting jacket instead of a layer of dragon scales that I had grown. I was wrong. How do you flay that off of yourself when it's the only armor you've ever known? Who is brave enough to stand all tender and bare, when the enemy is all around? I wasn't. I can see all the ways, now, that I simply returned to the well-worn grooves of my own history, for the last four years of this authoritarian insanity, the last year of this global pandemic. 

I have no doubt that plenty of others have traveled their well-worn grooves to get them through this time of outrage and untruths and disease. The thing about survival tactics is that they work, at some level, even if they aren't psychologically healthy ones. If survival is the goal, and it was for many, many people during these last four years, then a measure of grace is needed, both for those whose response was fight, and for those whose response was flight. 

While I'm trying to decide what that measure of grace might be, how to bestow it upon myself and others, I am hopeful that the coming days and months will give us the air and light and space we need to figure it all out, and find other ways of living besides just surviving. 

Things I'm doing right now: 

Painting interior house trim, and hating every minute of it. 

Reading a cookbook: Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi

Losing sleep over the anxiety-inducing ideas presented in this New York Times article: "How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted."

Adding salted caramel-flavor Bailey's Irish Cream to vanilla buttercream frosting. This isn't sponsored. This isn't a recipe (add a few tablespoons to a batch for part of the liquids). It's just solid advice for cake eaters. Go do it.