Empathy or Greed?
See if you have an answer
I am sitting with red eyes, too difficult to keep open as I let it out. I had two types of cries in a span of 3 hours; a warm one, while watching Grace and Frankie and a raged one as something happened at home and I took a piss on the people whom I felt closer to. See the past tense? That’s because the swing of the mood is right now on the farthest end.
This past week has been a bundle of emotions of all types. I got to know certain things about my closest people and I thought, all these years, I claimed I know their skin inside out, but I was so wrong! And that made me think, how it is totally normal to not really know a person despite knowing them for more than a decade.
And I also had a reinforcement on how much I am adored and by so many people. And despite all that, how I long to be loved by a constant in this universe right now although I have been someone who’s not believed in absolutes all along.
I gave surprise to 3 people and all three of them just loved it. One of them was the bride who got married yesterday to her love. And observing them talk or inquire about each other or become angry at each other only to pamper and get back to their normal selves and seeing them seeing each other, adoring, loving, wanting and wanting all of it, I felt all they’d have felt. God alone knows, how I am capable of feeling exactly what the people I observe might be feeling.
Marriage. By now, I have been a bit convinced that, Okay, I can get married. But I don’t want a grand wedding. Just signature and done. And if the person is okay, not even doing that. But the more marriages I keep attending (which I hardly did earlier) and the closer my involvement gets into the marriage processes, the planning and the families of both sides, I feel this strong connection which I think I’d take as a sign that I am taking an acceptance to the School of Thought that is Marriage.
And this has been the closest I have been a part of any marriage, right from helping the emotional crisis of the bride’s brother to managing certain logistics and taking care of the bride’s requirement to giving up my comfort zone of being a faraway part of marriages, only limited to having food, I learnt a lot about my own emotions and feelings and thoughts.
The way a mother loves her daughter who’d meet the same fate as she did, i.e. to leave her home, the way a father keeps ignoring or rather shielding every emotion of the upcoming void with responsibilities and arrangements and the love that a brother showers endlessly and selflessly on her sister, and the bride herself, fixated on so many things in one go - being a third person, I not only witnessed these but have lived these moments with them.
When she sat on the stomach of her mother, I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. I knew it was not my place to be there in that moment, but I am greedy. Greedy to feel. And I felt how she’d have felt her last night in her mother’s home as she demanded love from her loved ones.
I couldn’t look away when uncle randomly took everyone by surprise, as his face changed from a sulky to a shine countenance, his hands thrown in the air, as if letting go of the responsibility of doing his daughter’s wedding right, if only for a fleeting while and hugged his son, knowing he has his back.
I couldn’t look away when the siblings exchanged such glances that said a lot without a single utterance of word or even a twitch of a facial nerve and it was all there, in their eyes.
Because I was greedy. I am greedy. Feeling those things with them. Maybe as a parasite? I don’t know.
I have experienced so many things in these past four days, Oh! what do I tell you, we need to get on a call to talk about that :P but it has been quite a journey.
All these emotions! What does one do with that?
Sometimes I have also felt that I have hardly felt my own emotions because I let others’ overpower/overlap over my owns’
Is this empathy? or is this Greed?
Greed to feel it all?
And this reminds me of something Sylvia has written;
I used to feel horribly limited a few years back when I had this notion of doing it all, living it all, devouring it all, consuming it all and getting consumed in the process.
And if that’s the reason behind my empathy, is it not a selfish act?
I really don’t know the reason of this immense energy or rather a power (super) to feel ditto what you would be feeling, but I once read it that empathy has loneliness at its roots.
The flow of this dispatch has been what? a snake ride? a zig-zag?
Don’t know, but I am just writing whatever is coming to my mind without putting filters in the way of the feelings flow.
I still have so much to write because there are a lot of thoughts. But I’d just share a playlist with you. Do listen to it. Also, as you do so, don’t miss the comment section.
Don’t know why this one today, maybe because I cried a lot and maybe if you are someone who wants to just sit in a dark corner overlooking the sky with your own arms wrapped around yourself and allow those drops to rain from your eyes as your insides starts its process of decluttering or maybe sometimes just being comfortable with that rain, these piano patters might come handy.
Just imagine this.
And something that brought a sweet melancholy to my heart as the tongue tastes the tears…
You can imagine the jumps my mind would be making right now as it switches from one thing to the other just like these piano keys, taking you and me to a ride on the rain.
Friday is over. Almost over. And this reminds me, I have a romanticism with ‘Almosts’
So, in this Almost Finished Friday, I hope, you, the one reading it, can feel all the calm and chaos that I am feeling right now. And if you come to know whether it was out of greed, out of loneliness or just the sheer and pure emotion of feeling someone’s feeling, do let me know. Probably, with that, I might come to know of my own as well.
Feet finding flow flawlessly for-ever
- Flaky sends the best notes from the most peaceful piano so that your Saturday melts into the sweetest melody.