I am what people call an empath. Not in the spooky Star Trek type of way, but I am a person who is hyper-sensitive to other people’s emotions. I not only read people well, but I am personally affected by their emotions. At funerals I rarely cry until I see those close to the deceased crying. At weddings I cry happy tears when I see the joy of the couple.
Not only do I feel what others feel, but it sticks with me. There’s a reason I can’t watch certain films even though I hear they are fantastic—because I know the emotions will haunt me for weeks, perhaps even triggering an anxiety spiral because of their intensity.
I am not alone in this. Many creatives are also highly empathic. It’s what allows us to walk in other people’s shoes as we write characters different from us, inhabit and perform characters different from us, and envision a world different than ours.
And I know that many creatives, like myself, have been very off their game the past few years. In my case, my anxiety disorder has flared up, and everyone knows that when you are anxious you have difficulty focusing and therefore completing tasks. The past few years have been stressful for creatives, and for empaths in particular.
Darkness is everywhere we look, oozing over everything like a thick oil slick. The anger, the bitterness, the despair, the pain, the rise in hate crimes, the never-ending gun carnage…the list goes on and we empaths suck it all up like a sponge, whether we want to or not, and it infects us like a disease.
I think now that my creative slump is not just from my high anxiety. I realized the other day that I have been seeing so much darkness that I have had trouble seeing any light. My books contain some darkness, but in the end the light always wins. But I couldn’t see the light in real life, and I therefore struggled to find it in my work. I seemed caught in a black tunnel that had no end.
But a few days ago I watched Greta Thunberg’s impassioned speech and I saw hope. And I heard Alex Borstein urging women to “step out of line, ladies”. And I realized that I had been seeing something else these past few years, too. Something I hadn’t really noticed.
Women. Women coming together for a purpose. Women moving outside their comfort zones to make things happen. Women finding their voices and taking up positions of power. Women saying, “It’s our turn now.”
A change is coming. I do not know exactly what it will be, or how it will play out. But I feel it. A wave is cresting, sweeping in something new.
Maybe that is why I’ve seen only darkness for so long.
Because the darkest hour is always just before dawn.
A Bad Week – Lockdown Day 54
This week has been hard. Not sleeping well, for one thing, which always makes my anxiety worse. A dearth of good news in the news, for another. I see no light at the end of this tunnel—on the contrary, I see the tunnel being extended as states open too soon and people ignore social distancing because they are tired of it. Now instead of just fighting the virus, we are fighting each other, and it makes me sick inside.
I get that people are impatient for this to end. I am, too. I’ve had enough of never being alone, never being off the clock. Enough of the anxiety that sits on my chest all day every day. Of the tears I can’t even shed because I am never alone to do so. Of not writing. Of eating too much. Of this dystopian Groundhog Day.
I’m ready to be done with this, but I can’t be done with this because it’s not over yet. And the uncertainty of when it will be over is part of the problem. I talked about anticipatory anxiety early on, and it’s still there. I know this will all end one day, but the when and how is unknown, and that weighs heavily on me. I’m good in an immediate emergency, but this extended emergency is grinding me down.
I don’t really know how to shake out of this, because there is no end in sight. So I will just have to endure. Stay as isolated as possible, make up with my daughter from the fight we had last night, and try to get more sleep. All I can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other, because there is no way out but through.
Stay strong, stay home, stay healthy.