“You’re not a teenager anymore. Why do you have to be so moody?!” My exasperated mother would frequently cry.
She had a point. Throughout my life, my emotions have vacillated a thousand times a day. ‘Normal’ has never been my reality. I am a person of extremes. On an ordinary day, tears will rise, unbidden, tears of joy, tears of anger, tears of sadness or frustration. Living near to the ocean, I am familiar with its constant changes, the ebb and flow of its tides. That is exactly how my emotions work. They rise and fall like the traces on a heart monitor. More than that-they blend, separate, re-form. Maturity and self-awareness have helped me to find equilibrium, but it will never come easily.
I am an empath.
Are you made the same way?
We see beauty in ugliness, joy in misery, and poetry in the mundane. Nuances, sly glances, the non-verbal vocabulary, so often overlooked by most people, to us are vivid.
On a bus or train, I stare at people. It’s a compulsion because where others see features, where they assess clothes and accessories and sartorial elegance, I see a spirit. A soul. I’m trying to asses who they really are, what makes them tick, what their hopes are, their dreams, what they feel, think, dream of, want. Every person has a story. Every living thing has a tale to tell. As a writer I long to record them. I am in love with the craziness and chaos. The beauty of my surroundings.
Children fascinate me. They are tiny, vast receptacles filled with hope and unwritten potential. The exhausted, dark-circled eyes of their parents blandly acknowledge me, while I see their pride, the sheer, determined, relentless effort they put into raising their children, the love and hope that fuel their willingness to do the impossible every single day.
There’s a prism in every raindrop, a world in every grain of sand. My mi I am never bored.
Crowds and rooms full of strangers can literally take my breath away. I assimilate them, feeling the silent heartbeats, the pop, snap and crackle of their life force, saturating the atmosphere. At its worst it can trigger a migraine. At its best, I am filled with a sense of pure bliss.
For empaths, other people’s pain is distressing. Injustice and cruelty, affecting any living thing can move us profoundly. Not just from shared sadness but from frustration at our inability t to comfort and find a ‘cure,’ a solution. Other people’s pessimism and negativity can make us physically ill. Sponge-like, we absorb the vibrations until, like a drowning victim, we str to survive. Sometimes, we have no choice but to remove ourselves from their toxicity.
Yet, no matter how badly someone else behaves, we can usually find a rationale. We want to comprehend why. Oh I don’t mean we ought to excuse it or allow it to continue, though I know I once had ‘doormat’ stamped on my forehead. An optimist, I still believe, deep down, that people, for the most part, are intrinsically good. Sometimes na?ve, misinformed, lazy, desperate or badly taught, but still…fundamentally good.
An empath will see the heart in the coldness, the essence in the ignorant, the joy in the sadness, the beauty in the vile.
The cultivation of a sense of humour, the ability to find the absurd in the everyday, is vital. You can see that to be an empath can be a wonderful thing…or a nightmare.
Compassion and empathy are invaluable at any time and are essential these days. The modern ‘developed’ world celebrates the atavistic, the shallow, the trivial, the self-serving. We are bombarded daily by a money and ego-fed media making idols of the greedy and the terminally vain. We’re berated to think about number one, to seek ‘success’ in superficial, economic terms while letting the best in us, our humanity, starve and die.
In such times, as empaths, w but this crazy, broken world needs us.
More than ever.
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Forced adoptions devastated unwed girls
posted: March 27,
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left me shaking my head.
It’s not that I’ve never heard of young, unwed pregnant women of a certain era being “sent away” to have and give up their babies. It’s just that I never thought it out any further than that. I never considered what this might look like, or feel like, for each individual girl/woman who endured it.
Dan Rather has been interviewing hundreds of women around the globe who were victims of forced adoptions from the 1940s and right on through to the 80s. The end result of these interviews, an exposé of sorts, will be aired on HDNet in May.
From Australia to Spain, Ireland to America, and as recent as 1987, young mothers say they were “coerced”, “manipulated”, and “duped” into handing over their babies for adoption. These women say sometimes their parents forged consent documents, but more often they say these forced adoptions were coordinated by the people their families trusted most…priests, nuns, social workers, nurses or doctors.
The stories these women relay tell of unethical mistreatment: exile, coercion, deceit, betrayal, humiliation, drugging, kidnapping, shaming, and verbal abuse. Some were even told their babies had died. It all sounds like the kind of nightmare you pray you will wake up from.
From a mother’s point of view, I am longing to know, nowhere is it mentioned in the article, what part the girls’ parents played in these scenarios. How complicit were they? Did they have any idea what kind of pain they were putting their daughters through, and was it worth it to avoid the shame and embarrassment and dirty looks from the neighbors? How many of them had the courage to stand up for what should have been their daughters’ rights?
And what was the underlying motivation of the people who ran these homes for unwed mothers, some of which sound like baby-stealing operations? Was it purely greed, or did they believe they were doing the right thing?
During the interviews, Rather’s team asked the women to describe, in one word, their birth experience. Here’s what they got: “sad, trauma, barbaric, devastating, horrifying, tragic, torture, shattering, decimated.”One woman needed two words, “soul rape.”
Reading about forced adoptions drew my attention to a website called
the official site for a documentary film on this very topic, unwed mothers of the 40s, 50s and 60s. The film, made by Ann Fessler, is making its world premier debut in April.
According to Fessler, between 1945 and
million women in the United States lost their children to adoption.
Putting a child up for adoption must be challenging enough when it is done willfully, but to have adoption forced on you seems beyond cruel.
I have no idea how I would react if my teenaged daughter got pregnant. I sincerely hope I would have the strength and integrity to put her needs before mine.
Can you imagine being forced to give birth to and then give up your child? What would you do if your too-young daughter got pregnant?
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Latest in ProductsStarting Over: Windows 8 To DeScrewUpify Itself? | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Starting Over: Windows 8 To DeScrewUpify Itself?
on April 24th, 2013 at 11:00 am.
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Now that everyone who isn’t mad has roundly agreed that Windows 8 is a whole bucketful of stupid, even Microsoft are acknowledging that trying to bruteforce people into using their computers completely differently was a silly move. Yes, Windows 8 basically has cheerful old Windows 7 lurking underneath its disruptive, tablet-orientated Metro skin, but the wasted seconds spent getting it to it every time, or inefficiently trying to get to your program or option of choice, really stack up as the months wear on, and the frustration that the OS keeps insisting on doing its own thing doesn’t go away. Now multiple reports are coming in that the forthcoming 8.1 update will allow booting to the traditional desktop, and might even reinstate the Start button.
Obviously, ‘report’ and ‘rumour’ can often mean about as much as ‘duckfwibble’ and ‘sprouthack junior’ when it comes to unconfirmed stories about technology and games, but there does seem to be quite a lot pointing to a slight change in direction for the update codenamed Windows Blue. We’ve got
both rounding up apparently trusted sources talking about a newly-panned option for those who wish it to skip the Metro Start screen and have their PC operate in desktop mode by default. Someone’s also dug up the reference “CanSuppressStartScreen” in the registry of early Win 8.1 builds.
While not confirmation as such, we’ve also got Windows Product Manager Ian Moulster telling
that “I’ve changed my pitch from starting with the Start screen to starting with the Windows desktop when I talk to people about Windows 8. When you show them the desktop it looks like Windows 7 and in fact it is pretty much like Windows 7 except that it’s faster, it’s more secure, uses less power, starts up quicker and has interface tweaks across the board.” While he goes on to defend the Start Screen, any kind of Microsoft concession that the desktop is what people want is a pretty big deal.
A little vaguer than that is
of the sorely-missed Start button making a comeback. Unfortunately it will apparently just load the Metro Start screen rather than the traditional list of programs, but hey, at least it’s an attempt at reparation. To be honest though, there’s a bunch of perfectly good third-party programs around which add a Start button and a traditional Start menu, so it’s not going to be a game-changer. It’s more about what it signifies: that perhaps Microsoft are releasing they can’t get away with force people to abandon tried and tested ways of interacting with their computers. If they can make Windows 8.1 less of an arse, it’s good news for PC gamers – Win 8 is a little speedier than 7, some of the widgety things are quite nice and the desktop’s a little more visually customisable too.
Hell, if 8.1 really does do all this stuff, I might even switch to it. I’ve had 8 sat on a secondary hard drive for months, but right now it just drives me spare. I tried, I really did, but using the Metro stuff now is the proverbial red rag to me these days: stick a ring through my nostrils and call me bully. My precious, precious seconds!
