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Title: Explaining hyper-empathy to those who don’t experience it.
Author: Aoifeeeeee
Date: 5/13/22
Language: en
Topics: neurodiversity, hope, empathy, manifesto
Source: https://medium.com/@Aoifeeeee/explaining-hyper-empathy-to-those-who-dont-experience-it-4629fb20c296

Aoifeeeeee

Explaining hyper-empathy to those who don’t experience it.

I can’t. I wanted to write this article to try to explain how I feel

empathy for people who don’t experience it the same way I do, and after

thousands of conversations, text, linked articles, phone calls, and

Twitter threads, I came to the conclusion that I can’t. It’s just

different.

I try to explain that I’ve been like this my whole life, from

kindergarten when my teachers would tell my parents “[she’s] just so

sensitive, [she] cares so much.”, to when I heard last month that Wynn

Bruce burned himself alive to try to create a better future for our

world and the beings that live in it. When I found out that Wynn ended

his life to try to inspire people to stop our killing of our home the

Earth, I felt so much pain. And when I saw that nothing changed after

his death, I felt like the light of life in me went dark.

I then try to explain that an unthinkable amount of atrocities happen

every single day, some genuinely out of our control, and some told to us

to be out of our control just so we don’t feel bad for contributing to

them, so we can go back to buying our cell phones, drinking our coffee,

and snagging a good deal on Amazon. We have the ability to not buy these

products and engage in these services, and we know that they’re being

given to us as a result of actions that we consider immoral or

unethical, we just don’t care. Because we’re so unattached from the

child labor that mines the coltan for our phones to the slave labor that

assembles it, we assume it makes us free of culpability. It doesn’t. You

and I have so much blood on our hands, it’s not just the greedy CEOs of

those Fortune 500 companies who do, it’s us too.

When I get to that part, most people when armed with that knowledge are

able to handwave it away with a simple “well all consumption is

unethical under capitalism, it’s not like I have a choice after all”.

Part of me wishes I could believe that for myself, but I can’t. I know

how much pain my existence has caused and continues to cause for

unthinkable amounts of people around the world, and it hurts. It hurts

so much. My culture has made it so that just by living in the place I

was born, I am forced into hundreds of actions that hurt others every

day and it’s so ingrained in us that we can’t consider an alternative.

This is what Hyper-Empathy means to me. My brain can’t do the cognitive

dissonance everybody else does to not feel guilty for their

contributions to climate change, world hunger, child labor, slave labor,

war crimes, bigotry, oppression, and every other tragedy that goes on

constantly in our world. Every day I continue existing in this society I

know I am causing more pain than I could ever counteract through my

activism. I don’t know how to deal with that, to be honest. All I know

is that every time I see any news story about the 30th tragedy of the

day, I feel completely hopeless.

I don’t have a bittersweet paragraph to close this out on a lighter

note, because I don’t think there is an opportunity for a lighter note,

so I’m just going to end with this: The only thing keeping me from doing

what Wynn Bruce did is the belief that I could make more change by

continuing my life rather than ending it. I’m holding onto my last

strand of hope as strong as I can for as long as I can.