Kryptonite

Last time, there used to be this popular game we'd play as an ice breaker.  We would go around the circle and say what superpower we wanted to have to the person in the inner circle.  Once, I said that I wanted to be able to feel or understand what any person was feeling. I thought it was a pretty cool superpower--different from the regular ones.  My partner looked at me weirdly, "Why in the world would you want to be able to do that?"

Many years later, I laugh at this moment and wondered if I had misread the question.  I wondered if I had said a superpower I wish I had or something I already secretly had but didn't know yet. 

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Let me tell you what it is like to be someone who feels too much.  

Let me tell you what it is like when these kind of people feel pain--either from people around them or themselves.

It is a visceral experience.  It is feeling your gut churn inside out at the pit of your stomach.  It is feeling your heart in the middle of your chest, mercilessly beating in your rib cage.  You are unsure if it is trying to come out of your chest or trying get you to pay more attention to it.  But whatever it is trying to do, it hurts.  But how can emotional pain possibly be felt so tangibly? This emotion-turned-somatic experience is too ridiculous, it can't be real, you tell yourself.  So, you don't tell anyone lest they don't believe you, or worse, they tell you to "get over it".  Sometimes, you try to suppress it but many attempts have proven counter-productive; some attempts have resulted in grave consequences.

Sometimes, I wonder why I have to feel so much.  Why can't emotions, especially of disappointment, anger, discomfort, or aversion to conflict just pass through me? Why can't I be "normal"? Why does it have to stay inside of me when I have no desire at all to become the host to these parasitic feelings that just don't know how to leave me alone.  Why do I have to carry all these emotions of other people, to the point that I frequently can't distinguish which is their emotions and which is mine--and more often than not, they end up becoming the same thing.

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It is sometimes cool to have this superpower.  You see people, and then you really see people.  And you find so much joy in this world that people sometimes forget to notice or shrug off as "unimportant." I find myself discovering and appreciating so much more nuance in a person that apparently, other people don't see.  Sometimes, it feels like I'm wearing someone else's glasses--seeing what they are seeing and understanding how situations personally, relationally, and emotionally affect them.  It helps me talk to people and listen.  And it helps people open up.  If you could see all the colours that I see and live all the human stories that they tell, it is the most beautiful thing, I can tell you that.

And I guess today is just a bad day; things are overwhelming.  I just wanted to get this out--to remind myself that maybe this secret superpower can be my kryptonite. 

But that's not the only thing it can be.  

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