Empathetic Entitlement

Fake it ‘til you make it. That’s what they say, isn’t it?

"Kailyn, turn your empathy button on."

That’s what my mother used to tell me. Maybe if I feigned empathy it would come to me. So I performed it until it became muscle memory. I studied emotion as if it was a foreign language. Some people learned etiquette and manners from a young age, and I did as well so when it came to empathy, I watched people closely. Mirroring appropriate pauses, softening my voice at the right moments and touched and grabbed hands and shoulders when grief was in the room.

Is empathy no longer a performance or is it indistinguishable from the real thing? Perhaps this is how personality is created. Yet still I haven’t shed diamond tears for those that have left me, whether it’s through death or careless abandonment. Either way I’m exhausted from constantly keeping track of other’s emotions. Through a father’s unpredictability I learned this: I can identify disapproval by the closing of a cabinet or the tension that hangs stale in a solemn room full of children wanting to laugh, hug and kiss. Yet they never could. If you never had a father, I count you lucky.

So now I need control. I’m happy to know someone that told me abandonment will be imminent. Still, not my own control, but I know that rejection is closing in. I can enjoy your foot on my face, I can revel in your demeaning jokes about my looks and I can laugh without guilt. Here I am, the architect and the arsonist.

Or am I?

Whatever he, whoever he may be is, I am. Is he cold? So am I. Is he affectionate? So am I. Where are my legs? Where are my limbs? A muse of sorts, I’ll do and be whoever you need me to be. I will be whoever you are. I am an architect in that sense. I know exactly what I’m doing yet I always lose control and that’s how I become an arsonist. And when that moment comes is when we say goodbye.

Where do I go?

I’ll lie and say that I’m not that calculated but everything I do is premeditated. But I don’t know where to go. I don’t belong here. I’ve told anyone who will listen that I’m a mistake. That final solution hangs in the balance. I need some sort of control of my fate. Death doesn’t scare me, it’s the lack of control of it that shakes me to my core and keeps me up until dawn. I cry about it in the mirror, I plead for it in the shower and still I can’t claim repose.

So I am begging for all of this empathy, for all of your tears but maybe that’s the irony of it all.

I’ve spent years cataloging and calculating the performance of empathy. I thought I was studying humanity from the outside. Are you like me? Do you spend hours dissecting every interaction? Do you lie awake and picture all of those you’ve disappointed? Is this what it feels like when your mistakes finally catch up to you? I suppose someone without empathy wouldn’t feel the knife so deeply, wouldn’t care so much.

Perhaps the problem, and I’m theorizing here, was never the absence of empathy but rather that I learned it through fear and not love. And just maybe that’s why I’m always collecting your tears. Not because I cannot feel but because I am so incredibly desperate for someone to feel for me.