When Empathy Isn't Enough

This is a tough revelation to make: I've been afflicted with an ignorance of empathy throughout my life. Perhaps I've been selfish and prioritised my own needs above those of others. Perhaps there was a need, maybe even on an unconscious level, to maintain an emotional blindness towards the feelings of others. Perhaps I did not know what empathy was or failed to appreciate its significance in connection with life, whether human, animal or plant. 

To say I've spent my life an emotional wreck would be an understatement; it's been more akin to a sinking ship, broken, gasping to stay above water in an ocean violently unsettled by stormy weather. My emotions have been continuously bubbling and boiling away very much in the vein exclaimed by the three witches in Macbeth, who chant "double double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble". That, right there, is what's been going on inside. This leads me to an inconceivable state of being as it raises the question: what is the reconciliation that links the paradoxical coexistence of a bubbling cauldron of emotion and a lack of empathy?

On realising that there was a critical missing piece in the jigsaw of the human connections in my life, the meandering path I have staggered along trying to desperately fill in missing parts of the picture led me to a discovery: empathy. The dictionary defines empathy as "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another". 

Appreciating and whole heartedly embracing empathy and its power to bridge the gap in human connection, I've been making real efforts to encorporate the "vicarious experiencing" of the feelings of others in my day-to-day interactions. I've been trying to see things from the point of view of those I engage with, to feel what they feel and to reflect this back.

Misunderstandings, conflict and anger have somewhat diminished. Alas, they have not been eliminated. I have discovered that, with some people, empathy isn't enough. There needs to be a genuine desire for people to want to connect. If one party has no interest, because perhaps they choose to be driven by negative emotions stirred by a dislike of another, or they don't believe the connection meets their needs, then bucketloads of empathy may still not be enough; possibly nothing will. A new paradox is spawned: simultaneous coexistence of that bubbling cauldron and a bucketload of empathy. Just when I'd found one piece of the jigsaw I've lost another.