“Your bleeding heart is going to kill you”
When I was little I remember always being moved by the pain of others. Looking back now, there’s no wonder why I was this way. By infancy, I was already experiencing bodily trauma, and I think this experience I had no language for made me feel kindred to the suffering of others.
When Bambi’s mom died I was inconsolable. When Artax was lost to the Swamp of Sadness I felt in bones what it could have been like to sink with him.
Often, it was the case, that my mother pathologized this deep empathy of mine (it has roots but not in the books she was searching) and my father would lose his patience.
When I was 14 or so, he had finally had it. We were leaving the grocery store and the man with a sign needing money smiled at me. His eyes looked hollow and defeated. His body looked close to giving up. I got out of the car and opened the trunk and gave him a bag of apples. He held my hand a little longer than a handshake and I got back into the car.
My dad yelled tersely at me for giving away our food and said:
“You’re never going to fucking make it in life if you care so much about everything. Your bleeding heart is going to kill you”.
I’ve never felt so seen. And I had never felt so misunderstood. My father told me without telling me: “You are confronting and dismantling the very skill that I have to soothe myself in this horrible life, and when you act this way, I am moved to feel something intolerable”. This is what I choose to hear from that quick sound of fear and anger that left his mouth.
At an inpatient facility that I was placed in by my mother when I was 11, I was once again clashing with the medical system of mental health and the neglected and complicit abuse and violence my own caretaker was conducting. I didn’t have the language to say: “I’m not sick. But my mom is carrying the ghosts of three generations of mothers, incest, dead children, and failed love and I am the only person she can take it out on”. So instead I made up stories about how I was feeling better and couldn’t wait to be back to “normal”.
I met a girl there who was a ballerina. Her neck was longer than my forearm and her toes were a tangled mess of neurotic and principled work. She was carrying other people’s expectations in her too. So many expectations that she stopped eating. She was 14 and weighed 71 pounds. She had been there for 2 months and gained 10 pounds. My heart cracked wide open for her at lunchtime. I would sit with my food, take a bite, and wait for her, matching her pace, watching tears stream down her face. I told her she was beautiful and that I couldn’t begin to imagine the pain she felt she was swallowing back down. I couldn’t imagine, but I could witness.
What am I supposed to do now with this? What options does a person have when there’s no off switch to the amount of suffering to be felt in the air around me like a sulfur bloom after a match is put out? Death, pain, trauma, unsaid fears, and unattended secrets all hang in the ether just outside of the awareness of most people. Or maybe, my neurodivergence just didn’t allow for a pause button.
In a world where the gap between consciousness continues to grow, how can we stay tuned in but not tortured? I feel my father’s prophecy more and more on days like today. Scattered pieces of my lie in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, with my beloved friends' medically neglected dead infant, with the queer youth unhoused, with all the organizers I love who are barely existing in their bodies today, and with trans children waking up not knowing if the self they know will ever make it to adulthood. How people remain silent and casually walk around not screaming that the world is on fire remains my deepest mystery of humanity. Maybe I am not meant to feel this much, or maybe, more people should be feeling something.
I know some people aren’t made for the durability of witness. But I also know that witness is a skill taught and honed. I wonder if more eyes met more eyes if mine could have a rest for a moment. What could change for us if more people stayed watching? If even one more person refused to turn away, turn off, tune out. The ability to look away from the pain of others says more about that heart than anything else. If you feel that closing in on you when you see suffering if your natural inclination is anger at me and my bag of apples, what I hear you saying is:
“I never had a witness either, and something inside me so deeply needs seen”.
I need to believe that in the face of genocide, militaristic state violence, children choosing not to live to become adults, black and brown women shouldering the feeling and the rage of entire systems, and queer people being erased- that it isn’t that people don’t care, it’s that once you do, you’re stuck in an oceanswell that you’re afraid may kill you. It costs nothing to risk loving and listening so well that you feel like you’ll die. It may cost everything to someone if you don’t try.
My wish for all the people I have met building up blinders, checking out of modern events, engaging in paralysis, and assuming the position of the walking numb is this: May your smallest, most tender, most harmed self be seen, known, and loved. May that piece of you guide your heart and move you to find others who see your pain. May you learn the art of turning pain into rage, rage into the alchemical property of grief, and then into a love so bold it terrifies us all.
I cannot bear to think this is all that we can create. I won’t last to see it, but I know I’ll scatter myself every place I can dreaming of the world I know is possible.
