I had been cleaning the restrooms at work and had just stepped out into the dining room when I saw Dusty at the counter. My ginger friend was buying some food, pink glasses resting atop his largely-bald cranium. He works here, but it was his day off, though given he lives right next door, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see him.
Beside him was some guy I initially thought was his boyfriend, but I soon realized it was the thoroughly tattooed guy who often comes into our fast food establishment. Typically high on something speedy. I’d seen him in here earlier, sitting in the corner where no one else could see him, loitering, talking to me as I cleaned a nearby trash can despite my body language, which clearly conveyed I wasn’t in the mood for conversation. At least with him. It wasn’t indiscriminate in the least, either. I sensed he was only doing this, only being so over-the-top polite and commenting on how cold it was outside so I’d avoid kicking him out to avoid the guilt it would elicit in me due to the nature of his approach.
I didn’t have the authority to kick him out anyway, but I refuse to lie. I wasn’t fond of him.
He is the type of person found all too frequently in this shit hole of a town, the type of person that slowly but surely cured me of my naivete over the fifteen years in which I’ve worked at this dead-end, grease-infested job. The type of person that uses your empathy against you, manipulates you through manipulating your emotions.
For so long I had been a pushover, a goddamn door mat, putting the emotions of others before my own on default, devoid of any boundaries, and I have bags of shit like him to thank for my awakening, for my growth in this respect, for empathy without boundaries quickly becomes slavery. I still give a fuck, don’t get me wrong. I give a lot of fucks. Too many fucks. I have a bottomless bucket of fucks, but I no longer give them out so liberally, as people like him taught me a lesson. Let them have free reign pulling your heartstrings and you become a marionette; they become your puppeteer.
I know that my empathy, my sense — be it delusional or authentic; be the cause merely my hypersensitivity to subtle cues, largely but not entirely nonverbal, or some psi element, specifically emotional telepathy — that I can feel what others feel does not necessarily make me a good person, even when that empathy results in my compassion. It’s simple enough when you think about it.
If you’re empathic, for the sake of argument, let’s say that it is as it so often seems to me, which is to say that you’re actually feeling other people’s emotions involuntarily. What this means is that if someone feels bad, you feel bad. Naturally, you don’t want to feel bad, you want to feel good, but with empathy, in order to feel good, you need to make the other person feel good, and so you exercise compassion in an effort to make the other person feel good. Not only, as an empathic individual, does this mean that you have to do your damnedest to manipulate the other person’s emotions, albeit with the unerring aim of having positive effect, but that you’re essentially doing so out of selfishness.
If someone asks you for a cigarette, if someone asks you for money, if someone asks you for a ride, if someone asks you to give them special treatment in any way, as an empathic individual, you have to do this or face the consequences.
What are those consequences? Their hurt, their anger, their frustration that they failed in their attempts to manipulate you through elicitation of pity or sympathy — their selfish reactions, in other words, to the fact that you failed to take the bait and fall into their emotional trap. But you feel their selfish emotional reactions as if they were your own, and if you deny them what they want, if they feel that they’ve lost and you’ve won, you still lose, they still won, even if they’re too narcissistic, psychopathic, dumb and/or blind to fucking realize it, because you feel everything they feel and by killing them emotionally you kill yourself emotionally as a result.
Once they set out to manipulate you, they put you in a circumstance where it’s a lose-lose for you. You’re fucked either way.
Eventually, however, I learned — through being a pushover, a marionette, an abused slave far too many fucking times — that reactionary empathy does not necessarily need to result in compassion. To the contrary, reason can intervene. You just need to build up strength and endurance, that’s all. Learn to say no. You’ll feel their hurt, their frustration, their anger, sure — for fucking sure to the nth degree — but you learn to bear it, accept it, and you begin to gain back pieces of yourself you thought you lost forever. That you thought you’d traded in or had destroyed as a consequence of your “far-feeling” tendencies.
Nope. No more. Dispell those old illusions.
You’re no longer a stimulus-response robot, no longer a musical instrument they’re free to play. No longer a pushover, no longer a puppet. You learn to set up healthy boundaries. Show some signs of gaining awareness and growing some vital sense of self respect.
Which is where we come back to Dusty.
There was another guy, an even bigger shit-bag, that I have constantly dealt with. He used to come in constantly back in the day, hanging out in the dining room, making a mess for me to clean up despite rarely if every buying everything. He would expect us to ignore paying customers, asking for a free cup that he could fill with water. Once, and I’ll never forget it, he grew incredibly irritated, and said in a loud voice over the cacophonous chatter of paying customers, waiting eagerly on their orders, “I just want the water I deserve.”
Mr. Aqua doesn’t have a job. I sincerely doubt he ever did. We have a lot of individuals like him wandering around the town that I live in due to a place in town that focuses on behavioral health services and rehabilitation programs for those suffering from mental disorders, substance abuse and homelessness. They’re given access to housing, therapy, medication, and other forms of treatment, and offered a great deal of personal liberty in the process. Some truly need this and only accept and take what they need. Others? They take advantage of this compassionate system and try to extend that act of taking advantage of others in the neighborhood. This I’ve learned at a personal level. And with respect to some, not all, I must emphasize, they become enraged when you deny them unfiltered, nonjudgmental, mindlessly subservient compassion.
There was this one guy who would frequently ask people for cigarettes. One day, during one of many periods in which I was struggling financially and had limited funds to feed my nicotine addiction, I watched him gallivanting across the street, from just passed the parking lot of the church and towards the fast food hellfire shit-storm where I work. Towards me, I knew. I knew what would happen and, like an asshole, I awaited the falsification or verification of the intuition I still consistently cast doubt upon. And, as the perhaps bigger, yawning, cosmic-scale, gaping asshole that he might have been, he wasted no time in confirming what I would have been perfectly happy to dismiss as entirely paranoid and unjustifiably judgmental suspicions.
He crossed the street, entered the parking lot, and approached the area at the side of the building where I was crouched down, sucking the life from my cancer stick. I knew what he was after. How it was unfold. I called myself silly.
He approached me. Came right up to me and boldly asked me for a smoke, but I told him I couldn’t. And that was an honest confession, I should add. Highlight, underline and place emphasis upon. I told him that it wasn’t anything personal. See, I only had a limited supply that might carry me through to the end of the night, and only if I was careful.
He pushed. I still kindly said no.
He offered fifty cents for a smoke, but I had to tell him that fifty cents wouldn’t help me, as I still wouldn’t be able to buy smokes with my limited cash supply until I passed by the Circle K on the way home from work.
He pushes again, I again said no.
And then he lost his shit. Told me to fuck myself as he walked away, and continued bickering loudly under his breath how people were shit.
I’d given him a smoke before. I would have put money I didn’t have on that he didn’t even remember asking me on those previous occasions, or how I had actually provided him a smoke on those previous occasions, but that was another straw on the proverbial camel’s back. Not the straw that broke the back of that desert-bound beast of burden, I’m almost sure, but it was the straw that I highlighted, a moment that sticks out to me, one that I couldn’t forget for the life of me.
Sure, I was essentially a stranger, but he didn’t care about me as I cared about him at all — despite the fact that he was essentially a stranger. He was only focused on himself. A narcissist having a bad day, it seemed, with respect to his success as manipulating suckers like me. So over time, I decided to no longer be a sucker. I’ll take your hurt. Your anger. I’ll take my guilt and shame and self-loathing on top of it. I will not let my empathy make me a marionette. I will not be used and manipulated. I will grow a spine, grow balls. I refuse to be your emotional bitch.
One day recently, as I was cleaning the dining room, I had to deal with Mr. Aqua. He had long since overdosed, I believe it was on heroin, and had been through a program.He had come out the other end alive and healthy, but soon fell into his old habits, substance and thensome. I refused his ploys. I let him know it in my own way. I complained about him to Dusty, and in response, he told me a story. The guy had asked him for money. Dusty had asked him if it was for good, and he said yes, so Dusty took him to the place both Dusty and I now work and bought him some food. On the way there, the guy had explained to Dusty how he was the Guardian of Souls, and how he was currently fighting with the government. Dusty bought him some chicken sandwiches.
Tattooed guy was just another guy taking advantage of Dusty. Another piece of shit that used somebody, manipulated another person that cared enough to offer a helping hand, and it sickened me.
I wanted to grab Dusty by the collar and say, “Don’t be a tool. Don’t be a puppet. Some people need and deserve your help, but not this guy. Not him. He’s just using and abusing you and you’re letting him because you think it makes you a good person. That it’s scoring you points or something.
Wake up. Don’t be like I was. Don’t be a puppet. A pushover. Have some self respect.
Erect boundaries. Realize what you’re doing and why. Save yourself. Get out while you still can. Your compassion is important, but don’t invest it frivolously. You know better.
You must. You’re better than this. It’s not all black and white. You’re intelligent enough. See the spectrum. Accept the nuance. See it as it is, accept who you are, and don’t only aim to make yourself feel better through making them feel better. Be yourself. See it as it is. Truly make a difference.”
Though I said nothing, of course. Just went back to scraping shit-concrete off porcelain.
Me, a supposed empath. Enlightened, no less. Oh me: oh yes:
What a fucking hero.
Chronicles of a Madman. 