Reckless Empath

Empathy and its limits.

I need you to stop trying to understand women.

Seriously.

Stop.

Some of you have turned empathy into surveillance.

You meet a woman and immediately start excavating.

• Tell me about your mother.

• Tell me about your father.

• What happened with your ex?

• When did you stop feeling safe?

What the are you looking for?

A control panel?

This woman lived an entire childhood.

Thousands of mornings.

Rooms you’ve never entered.

Arguments you never heard.

A mother’s voice you never learned.

The feeling of being eight years old in a body that doesn’t even exist anymore.

And you ask:

“What was your relationship with your mother like?”

She compresses twenty years into four fucking sentences.

And you lean back like Sherlock Holmes.

“That explains a lot.”

Explains WHAT?

You took twenty years of consciousness, ran it through memory, compressed it into language, ran that language through your completely different consciousness, and somehow what came out the other side was a diagnosis.

You don’t have her childhood.

You have a ZIP file.

Half the files are missing.

The rest were translated.

And the password belongs to somebody else.

But here you come:

“She’s avoidant because her father...”

Shut that up.

You weren’t there.

You cannot go there.

You mistook a description of a country for citizenship.

And men have been trained into this shit.

Study her.

Learn her moods.

Understand her wounds.

Figure out why she pulls away.

Until eventually you understand that woman so fucking much you don’t have to listen to her anymore.

She says:

“Leave me alone.”

You hear:

“She’s afraid of intimacy.”

She says:

“I don’t want this.”

You hear:

“She’s scared of being loved.”

Congratulations.

Your empathy has become a hostage situation.

She can’t even tell you who she is because you’ve got a documentary about her playing in your head with your voice doing the narration.

That is not intimacy.

It is emotional ventriloquism.

And women do it too.

A man reaches for his wallet.

Takes a second too long.

Your entire history stands up in the courtroom.

• I’ve seen this before.

• My ex did that.

• I know that hesitation.

He says:

“I couldn’t find my card.”

You say:

“I know what I saw.”

No.

You don’t.

You saw a hand.

A wallet.

And three seconds.

Then your history wrote a screenplay, cast him as the lead, screened it inside your skull, and got angry at the actual man for not following the script.

Your experience is real.

Your inference is not eyewitness testimony.

Your history is not a search warrant for somebody else’s consciousness.

Because here’s the boundary nobody wants to accept:

You have never experienced a single second of another human being’s first-person life.

Not one.

There is no secret tunnel.

Love doesn’t get you in.

Marriage doesn’t get you in.

Empathy doesn’t get you in.

Twenty years together doesn’t get you in.

Your wife could explain herself to you for forty years.

You could know her habits better than anybody alive.

And you would still have accumulated exactly zero seconds of being her.

Somebody says:

“I’m depressed.”

And here comes the reckless empath.

“I know exactly how you feel.”

No you don’t.

You know how you felt.

They’re screaming from another building.

You can hear them.

You can believe them.

You can sit outside all fucking night.

You can bring food.

You can stay.

That’s compassion.

But stop pretending empathy became a crowbar that got the door open.

The door does not open from your side.

And some of you are exhausted in relationship because you’ve been trying to perform a job human beings cannot do.

Or worse, you use “understanding” to abandon yourself.

She hurts you.

Well, her mother...

She disappears.

Well, her attachment style...

She humiliates you.

Well, her last relationship...

DO YOU LIKE IT?

That’s the question you excavated her entire childhood to avoid answering.

Maybe the knife came from her childhood.

It’s still in your chest.

Maybe her mother sharpened it.

It’s still in your chest.

Maybe her father taught her how to hold it.

Fascinating.

IT IS STILL IN YOUR CHEST.

Compassion does not require you to bleed politely.

You are allowed to say:

“I don’t know why you do this. I know I don’t want this done to me.”4

And you know what?

Sometimes you won’t understand.

Good.

Try saying:

“I don’t know.”

Now try:

“I believe you.”

There.

Because that’s what the gap actually leaves us with.

• Testimony.

• Observation.

• Trust.

• Doubt.

• Faith.

• Uncertainty.

She says:

“I love you.”

You cannot open her chest and check whether love is installed.

He says:

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

You cannot subpoena his consciousness.

You can believe him.

Disbelieve him.

Remain uncertain.

But you cannot invent a fourth option:

“I know what you meant better than you do.”

No you don’t.

And this distinction will save your life:

• “I felt abandoned.”

Yours.

• “You wanted me to feel abandoned.”

Inference.

• “I felt pressured.”

Yours.

• “You were trying to pressure me.”

Inference.

Your experience has authority over your experience.

It does not make you an eyewitness to somebody else’s interior.

We’ve been climbing over the epistemic fence, breaking into somebody else’s house, moving all the furniture around, then screaming:

“WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS ISN’T YOUR HOUSE?”

GET OUT.

Go home.

Your consciousness is over there.

That’s the only one you’ve been issued.

Ask:

• What happened to me?

• What do I want?

• What am I willing to participate in?

And give the person you love the terrifying dignity of existing somewhere you cannot follow.

You can love them from here.

Listen from here.

Believe them from here.

Accompany them from here.

But you cannot become them from here.

Intimacy begins when you stop trying to break into somebody and knock.

And when they answer, you don’t walk in pretending it’s your house.

You stand at the door.

And listen.

“I believe you. But I will never know what it was like to be you.”

And maybe they say:

“I believe you too.”

No psychics.

No archaeologists.

No FBI investigation into somebody’s childhood.

Just two human beings standing across a distance neither one can cross, finally done pretending they can.

Now meet.