The Tale of A Twisted Crone

One Twisted Crone, The Tale of A Twisted Crone, A Twisted Crone's Story

This is my story. Whenever I finally get the right title.

To Be or Not To Be An Empath

Chapter 1

I never knew until I became an adult and ran across this pigeon hole label, just what and Empath is. I refuse that label unequivocally. “Why,” you might ask. All my life I've been taught the importance of fitting in, of being in my right place, and yet all the while, trying to be what I'm supposed to be, not feeling a senses of belonging. Feeling alienated, on the outside looking in. So the logical thing for me to do was to push back, to not fit in, to do the most outrageous things I could think of in order to be different. Maybe that behavior would serve to make me feel part of something. To be a rebel sounded and felt like a romantic way to live my life. So rejecting the label of Empath seems to me the right thing to do.

But what is an Empath exactly? Google...I love Google search because I can now find anything and everything that interests me and I can do it without the painstaking look through countless volumes of heavy books. Google search tells me that an Empath is a “highly sensitive, finely tuned instruments when it comes to emotions. They feel everything, sometimes to an extreme, and are less apt to intellectualize feelings. Intuition is the filter through which they experience the world.” Yes, that is what I have experienced all of the years of this life. And I suspect to some degree other lives as well. But of course I must not give into the temptation to put this label on myself, because I am so much more than that.

Being so sensitive to the feelings and the emotions, energy of another person is, to be honest, a heavy burden. I don't know if other people who have chosen to experience this state of being think of it as a burden, but it can be. Because of being such a conduit of energy from everywhere, a person can become overwhelmed. At times, I have withdrawn into complete solitude just because it was too painful to be physically, in the range of another person's energy. I will give you an example or two here.

One such experience comes to mind right away when I think along these lines, so I will recount the experience as best I can.

I was called one morning by my second ex husband with the news that his Mother had been discovered early that morning in her bed deceased. As anyone might expect, even though this man and I were no longer together, still, there was a connection with his family. I had known them all for many years. I went immediately to the home to find it overcome with the energy of grief and loss. Not only was I having to deal with my own feelings of loss for this Woman who had spent years trying to accept me into her family, and finally doing so, there was her husband. His feelings of loss, of fear, of shock, of deep despair over the death of his wife was too much for me. I just wanted to run from the place, to get as far away from that tragedy as possible. I could feel real physical pain right in the middle of my chest area, that hurt me so much, I didn't know how to make it stop. I did care deeply for this Woman but her passing should not have been felt by me that deeply. I was soaking up the pain that her husband was feeling. The more he talked with me, and the longer I sat with him watching silent tears stream down his face, the more distraught I became. There was nothing to do or say but to cry right along with him. As much as I wanted to run out of that house and get away from that energy, I had another discovery. I could run away and be free of that pain, but he could not! He was going to be dealing with this loss and grief for a long time. He could not get away from it just by leaving that house. A house that his wife had made come to life so many times with her Sunday morning family dinners, her Christmas time decorations when she took every picture, every nick knack, away and replaced it all with the Christmas season treasures that she had accumulated over a lifetime! Her very presence in that house brought it to invigorating life. He could not get away by running away, because he had spent his entire adult life up until that day, with this Woman by his side. So I found myself wishing fervently that I could be the kind of person who only sympathizes with someone else's trouble. Wishing that I could gently comfort, hold his hand, sit by him and listen and try to sooth, rather than feel that tremendous pain and loss and loneliness that my own essence was soaking up like a sponge. I couldn't block it, I didn't know how. And I stayed.