I should be asleep. I should have been asleep long ago. This would be true of any week night, but it’s especially true tonight. You see, I spent the whole day lying listlessly on the couch, not well enough to get up and do anything but not sick enough to feel entitled to such laziness. It was such a waste of a day off of work (though P seemed to really enjoy the excuse to laze around with me all day). So I should have been asleep tonight of all nights because I need to rest up and be well for work tomorrow. There’s so much that needs doing.

And yet, even after lying perfectly still for what seems like an age, sleep simply will not creep in and take hold. Now, I’m not one of those people who normally falls into bed and sleeps instantly. I generally lie awake long enough to process the day’s events or imagine the possible futures of characters in books. But I almost never find myself unable to turn my brain off and sleep. Tonight, though I find myself dwelling on some of that kind of drama that no doubt lurks in the recesses of everyone’s minds, just waiting for a quiet moment to leap out of its quiet corner and grind its heals into the softest, most tender parts of the imagination.

I’m anything but a drama queen, and I lead a pretty boring life, actually. But even so, there are a couple of lurkers that seize any opportunity to make me question myself, my life, and my future. Lucky me… the last couple of days have been chalk full of these little opportunities. Most of them involve other people, so I won’t go into them here, but I’m realizing that I’ll have to work a little harder to remind myself that none of this really and truly counts as “drama” in the grand scheme of things. None of this shakes any foundations.

So rather than play conversations or events over and over in my mind, I’ll lie here with my laptop propped up on a pillow. I’ll write. I’ll consult Dr. Google to learn more about why my pulse is fast and hard even though I’ve been lying perfectly still for 3 hours. I’ll poke my nose into the social networking sites I keep up with. I might even plug in my earphones and listen to part of a book on tape. Anything but lie still in the dark.

After my last post, I’ve talked to friends who have felt the need to apologize for ever telling me they weren’t feeling well, or or else they tell me they’re not feeling well and then saying something like “Oh no! Did I just hurt you? I’m sorry.” (Please note, this is not said sarcastically, or anything.) So I think I should clarify: I have never thought of these little pains as bad. It’s kind of like how stubbing your toe hurts and stretching hurts, but stretching is a good thing while stubbing your toe just plain hurts. If you don’t feel the stretch, something’s wrong and you’ll never increase your range of motion. It’s just sort of pointless. This is exactly how the empathy pains work. If I don’t feel them, something’s wrong. (Incidentally, I’ve known two pathological liars in my time, and while both could tell stories that would make me cry in sympathy, neither could excite these empathy pains… maybe that was my first clue that these people weren’t for real.)

Not only do I expect and hope to “feel the burn,” that constant connection to the people around me, I have historically sought out that feeling. It’s true confessions time. I’ve only told one other person in my entire life about this stuff, and that was just last night. So rather than step things up gradually I thought I’d just blab to a few million of my closest internet buddies…

So what’s this great secret? I used to read passages in books where a character gets sick over and over and over. That part of Oliver Twist where Oliver faints in the witness stand? I must have read that hundreds of times as a kid. Frodo struggling forward with that wraith knife in his shoulder…. ecstasies of agony. Sometimes, I’d peruse our bookshelves at home and read only those passages from each book that twisted my guts the most. Not only that, but I’d copy particularly affecting passages into a little notebook so that I could study them later.

Looking back, I don’t understand two things: why was this so important to me, and why was it so private that I’ve never EVER let on that I’d do this? I’ll probably never know.

I realized sometime in the middle of my college years that I’m weird. Up until then, I’d figured that everyone, when told tales of pain or illness, actually felt pain in sympathy. As it turns out, they don’t, at least not usually. As it turns out, only I get to be that lucky.

Today, for instance, a friend wrote that he was coming down with something, and that he’d shivered his way through a meeting. Reading this, the familiar twinge started up deep under my diaphragm and deep inside of the chest space nearest the my right shoulder, just as it always does. It feels like hot electricity, and the main part of it shoots at a slight diagonal between my lower ribs. And that was just for the flu! Things get a lot worse the more suffering is involved for the person who is actually afflicted.

And this works for emotional pain too. In fact, I can usually tell when people near me are upset or angry or stressed simply by paying attention to that line between my ribs, the hollow under my right shoulder, or a little space in the back of my throat that feels heavier the worse the other person’s pain. This unseen, unspoken version only works if people are physically near me, though.

I was just learning that this wasn’t exactly normal when I read a science fiction novel for a class. It was by Octavia Butler, and it involved a character who suffered from hyperempathy syndrome. If I remember right, this syndrome resulted from having a mother who was addicted to some futuristic recreational drug while pregnant. Kids suffering from this syndrome literally bleed if they saw others bleeding. I remember reading this and thinking, “Yes! I almost know what that’s like!” It felt so good to have it described that I later read the other books in that sci-fi series.

And yet, while it’s definitely uncomfortable, I wouldn’t give this internal sensor up if given the choice. I don’t know why, though. Maybe I’m just used to it.

[p.s. Comments are closed on this post and old comments are deleted because they had a tendency to get out of hand. Like nearly everything else in life, this is both a blessing and (occasionally) a hardship, so I’m not interested in bashing people who aren’t empathetic or in hearing about how empathy can be an utter curse. For me, this is just who I am, and I don’t know any other way to live. Usually I love it. Sometimes it hurts. Either way, this isn’t a manifesto.]

Thursday morning was a difficult one. I was wrenched out of sleep much earlier than my body thought was right, catapulted into a high-stakes all-morning workshop and demonstration, and then kept in mental high-gear all afternoon until about 4:15 (at which point my day wasn’t done, but at least the heavy lifting was over). And through it all, I was haunted by a curious and vivid déjà vu.

This wasn’t the good kind of déjà vu. It didn’t include any sense that the situation was about to become more beautiful, or more joyful, or more serene. No, this déjà vu was particularly troublesome because it stemmed from a dream I was having when I was wrenched out of sleep that morning, and what made it worse is that I couldn’t remember the dream at all. All I knew was that it had to do with me being in peril and possibly losing consciousness. Periodically throughout that day and most of the next, I’d suddenly have the strong sense that this is what was happening just as I was about to lose consciousness, and I’d have the urgent wish to escape whatever it was that was about to happen. The trouble was, I didn’t know what was about to happen, which made me even more anxious.

Meanwhile, the rational side of my brain knew that everything was related back to that unremembered dream, that I was not soon to be in peril, and that I was not, in fact, in danger of losing consciousness. This rational piece of brain poked fun at the cowering, phantom-haunted side of brain:

“Isn’t it funny that fainting is such a dramatic and romantic act in those Victorian novels you grew up reading, and yet when it comes right down to it, you’re this scared of drawing that kind of attention to yourself…

“Don’t know know you’re getting all worked up over a dream? You’re not even dizzy! Dizziness comes before fainting, you ninny.

“I know you don’t remember the dream, but you do know that it had nothing to do with being in a workshop. So why do you think this is related?”

And so the day went on, and I brainstormed solutions to problems, trained people on technology they’d never used, encouraged the nervous, laughed with the confident, and generally carried on with my day. But all the while, this crazy duel raged in my head with one side pleading with me to just go home and curl up under the covers where it’s safe, and the other side of me pointing and laughing at the frightened side.

I’m glad a little more sleep and a little less intensity at work seems to have helped those two sides settle down amicably and get on with the business of ordering my thoughts.