My work situation is frustrating enough I’m talking to strangers about it. I have a strange compulsion to organize everything around me. Not because the disarray bothers me but because I know it will ease the work of others. Watching someone try to cross a bridge that’s poorly made makes me want to build a better bridge so I won’t have to worry anymore.  I know the simpler solution is to not care in general but I just can’t seem to do that. 

Under-utilization is a special kind of hell where you see people struggling and are chastised for helping.  An empath’s worst nightmare – people stymied by something that you can fix with minimal effort.  Offering to help is counter-productive to the situation and the only real cure is patience and time.  I developed patience in 2014.  It was my New Year’s resolution and I stuck to it.  I determined that the hardest hurdle to patience is the first one and that is true.  Biding your time once makes every subsequent time easier.  Patience can be misinterpreted as laziness but the proof is in the pudding.  Patient people are rewarded while lazy people are asleep.

I don’t pretend to be interesting.  When I keep myself entertained, I don’t have to.  The funny thing about drug use is relativity.  I take the same 2 pills every morning to maintain a sane appearance for 99.9% of humanity.  I also smoke cannabis every day.  The strain of cannabis I smoke can drastically affect my mood for the day.  Yoga is good for managing the fluctuations.  I leave my house every day in a good mood.  Everything from that moment on is influenced by my environment.  That’s the curse of empathy but it doesn’t kill me.

I’m empathic.  I feel things around me the way some people hear sounds.  When an ambulance siren passes directly next to a human ears, most people cringe because the sound physically hurts.  That’s what it’s like when I’m near unfettered emotional turmoil.  I can feel the tense energy emanating from arguments as easily as the goosebumps on my skin.  The pains of rejection and disappointment glow in front of me with comical clarity.  I have a bad habit of seeing everything people don’t notice.  Knowing that about myself is a hard won victory.

Each experience makes me wiser and consequently, harder to reach.  I need more grounded influences in my life.  I crave the solid foundation of my past with the same hunger I harbor for an expensive steak dinner.  Both things I’ll have again one day, just at a different pace.