Poetry
I Shut My Eyes Too Late
Observation and imagination in an empath’s mind
I shut my eyes too late to block out what my ears observe another dispatch drops into mental spaces where each frame in filmic detail is imagined played then looped the moment she… the moment they… her wounds her pain her death tears down protection nonexistent in this sensitive mind.
I try to detach.
Another dispatch.
Dog mutilated forest decimated journalist decapitated.
With guilt avert my eyes move outside.
Old man alone with tears in a park. Old young woman homeless in the dark. Stray cat injured bird guilt for the spider down the sink — like a nerd studying the world for suffering and pain needing a circuit change in the brain.
I have no middle ground.
I’ve never been able to watch violence or cruelty. Anything I’ve unintentionally seen or heard does tend to get repayed in such a way that I imagine how it feels to be the victim. This happens more so if I’m feeling anxious. There are a couple of news stories, years old now, which still come back to me and I have to make a conscious effort to distract myself from them. While I obviously don’t go through these experiences, I feel a degree of the pain and horror involved in my gut.
My empathy has its uses of course. It has helped me to better understand the experiences of the many vulnerable people I have worked with and more generally it means I’m a very caring person, which I’m glad of but wish I could adjust the degee to which I feel.
It’s less than a year since I became aware there really is such a thing as an empath or highly sensitive person and I’ve read that our brains do work differently. A friend of mine said, it’s a gift, but I often find it a curse, partly because it comes with an urge to want to fix everything while knowing I can’t. She also said I need to practise detachment. Reminding myself to let go of what I can’t control is helping, which is good because the older I get the more intensely I feel.
As always, with many thanks to David S. for another thought provoking piece. I’m not sure if what I’ve done here is what you imagined, but I thank you for the prompt to put it down.
My previous piece on Dead Poets Live:
