Feeling With People

Sometimes I wish I didn't feel so much.

For a long time, I didn’t realize I was weird. I thought everyone felt things as deeply as I did. They were just better at hiding it or managing it than I was. I struggled to understand, therefore, how people could be purposefully hurtful towards others - like being cruel, or abusive, or hateful. Didn’t it hurt them, too?

It wasn’t until I was an adult in my 30s that I heard of something called a Highly Sensitive Person. Highly Sensitive People, or HSPs, become very easily overstimulated by too much sensory input. For example, too much noise, too many smells, too much light, etc. Check, check, check, in my case. But HSPs also tend to have more empathy than others. They pick up on feelings of other people, and they feel deeply, as though those feelings are their own. Again, check. Apparently, 15% of the population are HSPs. It could potentially be considered a type of neurodivergence, though some argue this would classify HSP as a disorder, while it is more like a trait.

The over-empathizing thing can be a lot. It’s not just real-life, in-person encounters that affect me, either. If I read a book and someone dies, I feel sad. Not just when I read the book, but even for 2 to 3 days after. If I read or watch a movie and two people fall in love and get married, I feel warm and rosy and happy for 2 to 3 days after. It’s probably why I love rom-coms - it’s like a shot of endorphins. Goodness knows I can’t watch horror movies or serial killer documentaries, as you can imagine what that might feel like!

New stories are the worst because they are real life and I can’t forget that they're real life, and that these people are actually suffering. I feel their suffering on a deep level. Which means these past five months have been a lot. The innocent young men, boys young enough for me to be their mother, sent to one of the worst prisons in the world for no reason other than one man’s hatred and racism and political game. The young teens, zip-tied at immigration hearings. The little children, dying of starvation in Africa while food rots in warehouses here in the United States. Food that was supposed to go to their tummies. 103 children and their families dying every hour of every day since USAID was cut off, over 300,000 so far. Single mothers on food stamps and Medicaid just trying to make ends meet, struggling in a day-by-day existence, now facing the very real possibility that the wealthy in DC will take it all away from them.

Brene Brown defines empathy as, "Feeling with people." I feel with people - even those I don't know. Sometimes I wish I didn’t. But I do. 

In my prayers to God, I say, this must break your heart even more than mine. God has such a heart for the poor, for the oppressed, for the marginalized. It’s all over the Bible from cover to cover, with His protections for the least of these and His orders for His people to care for them. If I hurt for these people, the hurt I feel is only a minuscule fraction of what He must feel.

Why do we continue to hurt each other? Does our greed and love for our vices know no end? All these wealthy people stealing things for themselves, they do know they can’t take it with them, right? They do know how history will remember them, don’t they? Not well. Not fondly. But as thieves and grifters and hoarders.

How will history remember those who support them? The supporters who continue to cheer them on, even when the rich are stealing from their own pockets. New Pope Leo XIV made news when he said, "The rich and powerful should act with justice towards the poor, not oppress them. Faith calls us to lift the downtrodden, not to follow those who crush them." 

What does it mean? What can we do? People say, well, the government shouldn’t be caring for the poor anyway; it’s the church’s responsibility. So, what is the church doing? Are we prepared to take on 13.7 million people who will lose their health insurance if this budget bill goes through? Are we prepared to deal with the over 2 million hungry children and families who will no longer have food stamps and will not be able to afford groceries? Are we going to take all of them?

Likely not. Even if we had the means to do so, the Church tends to not want to share, either. We've bought into this American mindset of the poor being lazy or taking advantage of the system, rather than taking accountability for how our system creates the poor and does everything it can to keep them there. We've allowed American ideals of "pull yourself up from your bootstraps" and "every man for himself" to override Biblical commands to care for the poor and needy, to truly be Matthew 25 Christians.

I remember reading somewhere that archaeologists know they've found a civilized society when they discover human remains with a broken femur bone that healed over. In the animal kingdom, animals with such injuries are left behind to die or be eaten, because they’d be unable to walk and keep up with the others. A healed femur means someone took care of the individual until they were able to once more walk on their own. It means someone had empathy for the other.

Perhaps, then, empathy is what most makes us human. A society void of empathy, with everyone only out for themselves, will eventually destroy itself and the world around it.

We are on that path.

So, what are you going to do about it?

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