[738] Empathy Hawks

It occurred to me that the extent of presumptions made under tribalistic tendencies is more pervasive than I care to generally accommodate in my daily approach to people.

When I reflect on the “poor” and addicted people I deal with daily, it becomes very real that most of the people who advocate on their behalf, or at least pretend to, in politics or perhaps online, aren't really dealing with these people. I'm as sympathetic to anyone who moves from one struggle to the next and can't seem to find a leg up. I describe singular moments or bad days as years of pain and waste more than occasionally. What isn't lost on me, and I fear what many advocates fail to understand, is that you can be poor and struggling and addicted, and still be a useless asshole.

The poster-children for the types that seem to care the most about how or whether we create and protect social safety nets, seem to be people who've managed to overcome their circumstances and want to give back, or people who are under the illusion their success had everything to do with them and them alone. The former run non-profits or local initiatives, in lieu or spite of larger organization or communication, the latter scream about entitlements and invent disparagements. The former plagued with an, in my estimation, over-active empathy system, the latter a simultaneously predatory and defensive actor.

I think about these people so much relative to myself and the kind of negative feedback I get with regard to my behavior or words. These “clients” are actively malicious. They'll beat the shit out of their girlfriends, routinely, and the entire family will look you in the eye and not blink when they describe what a sweetheart that person really is. They'll lie as though their lives depend on it. They'll fight about minor miscommunications. They'll pump so much sugar and cigarette smoke into their bodies their kids' teeth will fall out and they'll talk to each other like trash if they can't get a fix every 20 minutes.

Then The State comes in and says, “We'll give you therapy, we'll send you to addictions counseling, we'll transport your kids to several different locations all over the state and get them tested, we'll put them in tutoring, we'll help pay your bills, find you a job, and make ourselves available day and night if you need to talk.” Then they get entitled. Or perhaps, the malicious driver of the entitlement comes to the forefront, and lambastes any and all effort to try and make the situation better and hold people accountable.

It's a dramatic exaggerated circumstance, repeated in a dozen iterations, of my “difficult conversations” about friend group dynamics or behavior. In my job, if you're 10 minutes late to an appointment, it can mean getting you painted as an unreliable liar who's sabotaging time between mother and child and isn't sympathetic to the needs of someone in crisis. The person who referred you the case can turn on you or put a black mark on your company. It can be a grudge that pops up months later as a client screams at you over the phone. I can recall a handful of instances I ever raised my voice at an ex let alone got into any kind of notable fight with a friend, but examples will be used for years to bombard my character and as fuel to stoke the flames of my ignorance, intransigence, or malignancy.

Then I start to wonder, is it exaggerated? Or isn't it just the obvious and consistent impulse of the entitled empathy hawk? That is, how many times have you heard, “You're entitled to your feelings.” It imbues feeling, whatever it manifests, as tantamount to an inalienable right to be exercised with impunity. Unlike rights, you're born with as many convoluted and conflicting feelings as you can conjure, and there is barely the cultural insistence you have to fight or have part of you die in order to earn them. “You hurt me!” The charge rings unto eternity. Then comes time to employ “digging your own grave” the more you try to explore how or attempt to “make it better.”

That's part of the illusion we're operating under. From the lowliest client to our government writ-large. You can't make fluid blind pathology better. You can kill it, and it will act as a martyr for the dormant sense in us all that is tempted by its power. I keep asking myself why do the people I engage with all seem to have such small perspectives? How long do you have to live or lessons must you encounter before something clicks and change may come? How many drug tests that came back positive are you going to deny? How many plans are you going to make that you never intended to keep? How many times can you have the same fight before you try to make something better?

But those questions exist under the relative-delusion that things will, in fact, get better. That everyone, no matter their station or experience, has a concept of “better.” It's all relative to something. Relative to their basic grasp of language. Relative to the abuses they've experienced in the past. Relative to the pain you can't document during a visit. Relative to what they can see at all. And you certainly can't see what you're unwilling or unable to look for.

This speaks to my inability to fall too far down a rabbit hole condemning my behavior as damming as I've been portrayed. I'm pathologically proud of when I choose to be malicious. It means I felt you deserved it. It means I got a little high on the rage or self-righteousness. It means I got the rare opportunity to show you proof that I have lines and I was clear about what would happen when they were crossed. Politely attempting to engage in conversation and ask questions is literally never that.

When I'm met with open and ongoing hostility to the exercise, the problem is never me, in what I consider the most fundamental way. This isn't me calling myself perfect, nor is it denying that I can be excessively mean or rude. It means if you can't tell the difference between polite questions and ongoing conversation and FUCK YOU, I DIDN'T DO SHIT, I HATE YOU, I'VE NEVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG, I certainly can't address that, anymore than I can the addict who doesn't care I stayed later to ensure she got her full time, and ignores when she got high to blow off her previous visit.

This job forces you to be the “reasonable person” at all times. When you slip, it's like someone banged a gong for the ripple of consequences. You last by insulating yourself with people who engage the same kinds of people as often as you do, and know the kind of TLC, tact, and concessions to not damn the whole enterprise, and you, out of existence. Part of me feels like I shouldn't be seeing such a connection in the breakdown of my previous friendships with the behaviors of these people. A larger part of me says the “friends” who've fallen would think ill of me first and foremost before contemplating the abuses and addictions, if they acknowledged them at all. Does that seem right to you?

So then how do we, or do we even bother, assigning blame? I concede certain people can't be helped. An asshole is an asshole at any income level. I know the habits of patience and deference are things that need to be massaged and imprinted on me better, but my fuck ups are mildly mis-worded (for the workplace) emails, and disparagingly felt commentaries over social media. I don't blow smoke in your face and attack you for coughing about it. I didn't bring a child into the world who needs 6 root canals at 15 because of what I've been feeding it. I don't ever tell you things like, “A baby dropped a bottle on my face, so now I have 2 black eyes.” Wouldn't that be frustrating? If I gave you responses like that when you tried to talk about your feelings or how I hurt you?

On the spot, I can barely imagine what those kind of responses would even sound like. “You hurt me!” Well, every time I watched you cook, I knew you were waiting to plunge a knife in my side, so I just got out in front of it and squeezed your arm purple so you couldn't get me first! “You're not taking responsibility!” I've never even talked to the person you're referring to! How could I have slept with/insulted/made cry/pushed over a cliff someone I've never even met! “You don't even care!” I care about the environment and nuclear war, so of course I must care about you too!” Distracting, denial ridden, irrelevant, and paranoid. If I reacted or responded like that, I get it, monster in chief.

Is that how I'm read? Probably. When you take to a page to head-off your pathology, it's a fluid stream of potentially ridiculous impulses and sentiments. If someone needs a bad view of you, there's plenty. Take yourself into the real world and put on the “professional” face, even if you never fuck up, which is inevitable, but even if you never did, it's people imprinting their desires and insecurities and denials onto everything you do. There is no 10 or 100 second count. There are no other reasons.

Just like even when I call people unredeemable and an asshole an asshole, I can at least say “maybe.” There is no maybe generally allotted when we're making our harshest judgments and trying to make a conversation, or person, go away. There is no maybe when we fear the retribution of our in-group if we don't play along. Some people deserve a capital Maybe in a way others don't. We lose that distinction by entitling our feelings to placate being. You sow unreasonable doubt in the minds and hearts of who are otherwise your closest allies.

When I say things like, “I don't have hope,” or “I don’t believe in love,” it's underwritten by insights like these. I can literally do “nothing.” I'm not a “maybe” in the minds of people. And I'm not because I take responsibility for myself, and that's an easy and strong example to co-opt into something nefarious. “Haven't you heard!? He's already admitted the whole world is his fault! Get him!” It's the same self-destructive impulse, across mediums and examples, that attacks me and mistakenly thinks it's protecting you. I invert that relationship. Blogs pick me apart and with each one I feel less and less capable of fixing anything, let alone another person, or the world. But that's also the only way you can discover who you are and what you may do to in fact be of the right kind of consequences for yourself and others.

As I've also asked many times in the past, who really wants to empathize with me? I don't even want the shit I go through. I don't like seeing ten steps ahead, be it in some social game, or just the ways I'll breakdown if I don't begrudgingly continue to slog through life. I genuinely fantasize about when I'll finally get to close my eyes and not wake up anxious about how the day will shit on me. And yet, I'm still here. I'm still “even enough” spirited. I continue to hold a place of distinction at work and navigate new relationships and challenges every day. I can't count the number of times I've died. I don't know that this manifestation of my being is the 10 to a trillion trillionth iteration of multiple parallel universes. But I do know when I've lied. I do know when I've acted in bad faith. I do know when I've felt genuine affection or care and how that's tempered nihilism or fatalism and professions of hopelessness. And I know it is all bad, and all good, for an endless story of reasons. We throw it all away over merely feeling some sort of way about it.