The gift of guilty — An ode to oversensitivity

I am extremely oversensitive. Every time I see somebody who is old or physically weak and needs help but doesn’t get it, I want to cry. Every time I see somebody not getting their due it makes my blood boil. Something as commonplace as a salesman coming to my house to sell something and my mother saying no to him makes me want to bawl my eyes out.

And then I sit and wonder how is everybody dealing with life so bravely and why am I being a little cry baby over here?

Also, if I remain like this how will I function in the big bad world?

A recent incident from my life completely changed my perspective.

I had been serving as a writer for a visually challenged student (he has only thirty percent vision in one eye), basically what I had to do was read out all the questions in the question paper and write the answers as he dictated them. I wrote three of his papers and we ended up spending a lot of time together before and after his exam. This boy is twenty-five and from a lower middle class family in India.

Now here’s the thing every time I meet somebody I instantly start thinking about what must be going on in that person’s personal or emotional life, I start imagining what that person’s daily life must be like, what challenges he or she must be facing, so, invariably I started doing the same with him.

One thought led to another and I started thinking about this boy’s love life, I though (much to my dismay) maybe he will never find love, maybe his parents have to find some girl who is physically challenged or has some problem in her to marry him. This is something that is ingrained into my Indian brain that only perfectly healthy, wealthy and moral people find good partners. If there is a slight taint in either your reputation or physical or mental health forget being married to a normal person (as per most Indian people). Also, love is an area that I find challenging because I don’t consider myself the perfect Indian bahu (bride) and there have been times when people around me and my family have questioned my ability to ever settle down with somebody.

Maybe that’s why I was feeling so concerned for this boy. Now, as I get to know him better I find out that he has been a professional dancer, a cricket player, he has had four unsuccessful relationships and now he is married to who he considers the love of his life. I am ashamed of the fact that I was stunned, I completely focused on his handicap and refused to look at him as a person who has normal quarter life issues.

That’s when I realised, I have to stop playing the what if game, I constantly think — what if I was in his or her place and that makes me a really empathetic person but it also clouds my sense of reality because at this moment I am not in that person’s place and I can only assume or guess what the other person is feeling.

So, before I start pitying or feeling bad for somebody else, I need to talk to that person and find out if it is pity or help that they want or just love and respect.

I have learned one lesson from this whole incident that things are never as they seem, before pitying a person I need to make sure if that person really deserves or even needs my sympathy.

Also, I need ask myself if what I am feeling is genuine compassion or pity born out of guilt?

For instance every time I am in my car and I see people waiting for a bus, specially in the brutal Indian summers it breaks my heart but is it real concern? Would I get down and stand with them or give them a ride? Maybe not. I feel like it’s more of a guilt that is born out of having something that other people don’t have. I feel like I have am fortunate and also hyper aware of the fact that the only thing that separates me from the people roughing it on the road is that I was born into money.

Apart from all of this, seeing somebody being disrespected, insulted or ignored makes my heart stop in my chest, I feel a sense of panic. So say, if a hawker is trying to sell his products on the top of his voice on a noisy road and nobody is really listening or paying attention to him, the whole situation would make me unnaturally morose.

If it was upto me everybody would have everything, everybody would be equally successful and nobody would need to shout on top of their voices to be heard.

But that’s not how the world works, if everybody does have everything it’s unfair to those who worked their way to the top. They deserve their success and they deserve to be standing out because they started from the very bottom and persevered inspite of being ignored in the first place.

Maybe I cannot handle being ignored, thats why I spend a majority of my life sitting in a corner not wanting to say anything or be heard or seen, now that I am standing and raising my voice suddenly I feel less pity and more admiration for all of the people who are trying so fucking hard.