Me: Hello, Jamie and Erik.
Jamie: Hello, Elisa.
Erik: Hello, Mom.
Me: Hi, sweetie. Hey, listen. I’m going to give you a choice today. I’d like for you to choose between talking about vulnerability, protecting yourself if you’re an empath and things like that or the importance of simplicity and how to achieve it. Dealer’s choice! Go for it!
Jamie (chuckling): Dealer’s choice.
Erik: Fuck being simple. No, no, no. I was just teasing.
I laugh.
Jamie: You mentioned something about protection?
Me: Yeah, vulnerability. You know how you talk about vulnerability as a good thing, but then we have to consider the empathy. First, we have to talk about what an empath is for people who don’t know it.
Jamie: Yeah, he wants to talk about empaths.
Me: Okay, let’s talk about that. Tell us what an empath is, Erik. Share with the class.
Erik (clapping his hands, then rubbing them together): An empath is someone who naturally feels what other people are feeling. They use their entire body and all the energy around them to collect information. They can do it by mimicking another person’s information; they can do it by processing it, which is way too much. I don’t fucking recommend that, but a lot of people do that, and then they get sick and a whole bunch of shit goes down.
Me: Yeah.
Erik: An empath can also –
(Pause)
Jamie (To Erik): So you’re making a distinction between sensing and feeling? (Pause) Okay. He mentioned before that they feel what the other person feels, and then he’s making a different statement that they can sense.
Erik: If we were to see it logically, we have our own thoughts and then we have premonitions and intuitions. For an empath, they have their own feelings; they can feel somebody else’s feelings and then they can sense somebody else’s thoughts.
Me: What can you tell a person? How can they tell if they’re an empath? What would it look like to be one?
Jamie listens, then laughs.
Me: Would they cry all the time, get easily overwhelmed, be sensitive to criticism? Just tell me some of the stuff.
Erik: I’ll ask you one question.
Jamie (Smiling): He’s leaning in over the camera.
Erik (Like a self-help commercial): Do you feel crazy? You could be an empath!
Jamie laughs.
Me: Ah! Sounds like a commercial.
Jamie: Doesn’t it?
Me: Mm hm.
(Pause)
Jamie (To Erik): Oh, Jeff? Yeah, I know what guy you’re talking about. The white trash jokes?
Me: Oh, Jeff Foxworthy?
Jamie: Jeff Foxworthy.
Me: Oh, sure.
Erik: It’d be funny to do a series of—
Me: “If you do such and such, you’re probably a redneck.”
Erik: It’s everything that my mom said. If you’re easily overwhelmed, you can’t handle being around a lot of people, loud sounds bother you because your whole energetic body is vibrating off of it so it’s like hearing it tenfold inside of you, if your mood swings are spiked without you having a trigger, you know, you just wake up and you’re having a good morning, and then all of a sudden (fake crying) “It’s all just terrible. It’s just so sad. It’s horrible,” and then you talk to your best friend and something really traumatic happened to her and you should be clued in. “Oh, look at that. I was processing her shit for her. Isn’t that nice of me?”
Jamie laughs.
Erik: Easy to cry.
That’s me.
Erik: That and the mood swings for no reason—it might not be hormonal.
Me: Are there empaths out there that are misdiagnosed with mental illnesses like major depression or bipolar disease?
Erik: Not so much bipolar disease because it’s not so much a heady thing. They’d probably be misdiagnosed with depression, anxiety, all kinds of disorders—
Jamie: Some kind of phobia. He’s talking about a phobia.
Me: Social anxiety?
Erik: Yeah.
Me: So that’s another thing. If you’re suffering from one of these mental illnesses, it may not be that you have those. It may be that you’re an empath.
Erik: Yes.
What kind of empath are you?
Last thing, guys. Now that we’ve been going strong for 6 years, we have a lot of posts that most of you have never seen. So I was thinking that it might be a good idea to re-post some of those older entries on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Could you please click on what you want?
