Sympathy Pains

Somehow, I managed to overcome my excessive laziness to edit 20 pages of my novel, finish reading a fantastic book called Fanny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, and cook a very attractive dinner to boot. I should have been feeling great today, but instead I felt unusually sad, and it wasn’t until I got into the car to come to work that I realized that sympathy pains may be the culprit.

I’ve always been a little skeptical about sympathy pains because it’s never made sense to me how feelings and emotions could transfer between people. However, the more I read, and the more life I experience, the more I’m convinced that there has to be some validity to the whole sympathy pain phenomenon. My mother, especially feels them like no other person in our family. My mother is so sensitive that she can pick up sympathy pains from a thousand miles away. My sensitivity, however, is not that strong and it’s extremely rare for me to sense anything outside my own city. However, it’s almost impossible for me not to pick up the sadness that exists in my only house.

One of my great-aunts died at the ripe old age of 93 so while her death is not a shock, that doesn’t mean that the mourning process is any easier. Although I don’t believe my mother, herself, is upset about her aunt’s death, I think that she is subconsciously picking up some very strong sympathy pains from our family in Detroit. Her mood got so bad today that she even had to leave work early so she would not take her bad temperament out on her employees. When she got home, I naturally let her vent about her mood, and talk about how confused she was about what was causing this. She didn’t even seem to realize that her mood could have been projected upon her all the way from Detroit and I didn’t think about it either until I started to take on her poor mood.

It’s hard to describe what I felt like at that moment, but it was like I was experiencing a depression that was not my own. I even started to crave music only my mother would like. On the drive in to work for example, I wanted to listen to her some of her smooth jazz music, which is so not my style, and because this music selection was so atypical, it made me realize that at the moment, I was not living for myself but was sympathizing with my mother so much that I was hurting where she hurt, and I listened to her favorite songs because I thought it would comfort both our sympathy pains.

I feel much better now that I’m at work and am able to be by myself without my mother’s very intense aura intruding upon me. It’s also comforting to know that this emotional imbalance is not really my own and that all it takes to be myself again is a little time away and a brief look through this written microscope.