This post is about empathy. I think of myself as a very empathetic person. I guess it would depend on which definition of empathy you want to choose. I tend to think of it in the ‘experience of foreign consciousness in general’ bit. Some people say that it’s not only being able to understand the feelings of others, but also knowing the appropriate response. I’m not too good at that last part. It’s a ‘sophisticated imaginative process’ and I am a VERY imaginative person. I’d say half of the things going on in my head every day is pure imagination. At least half.

In general, I think this is a pretty good thing. The problem comes in, though, when I get that way about fictional characters in TV/movies. If I happen to get emotionally invested in characters, I very much feel what they feel. When the plot is up, it’s good times for me. When the plot goes darker, it’s a rough few days for me. I think this is why whenever I leave a movie theater I feel like I can do anything. My general outlook and confidence levels are so high, it’s almost alpha male-like. I am unstoppable. The feeling goes away, unfortunately. Movies pretty much always have happy endings. Well, they’re not unhappy, anyway. And that happiness makes me happy. It’s different with TV. TV is a long journey. Seasons go on for weeks and months. Things go up and down. When I watch two seasons in two days, it’s a big fucking shitstorm for me mentally, especially if I get attached to one (or more) characters. That happened this weekend. I’m house-sitting and pretty much the only thing I do when I’m house-sitting is watch TV. More than usual. Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true. This weekend, I was watching Skins, a BBC teen drama that I read good things about. Don’t let the ‘teen drama’ label fool you. Apparently, England does teen dramas a lot differently than the US. It really is a hell of a show. As it happens, I got emotionally invested in several of the main characters. The ups in this show are good, and the downs in this show are very, very down. That’s where I’ve been at for the past few days. Down.

The ups affect me differently than the downs. The happiness I get from the good times make me happy for everyone and everything. I take the downs, though, and apply them only to me. I take the emotions the characters are having and turn them into my own. It’s a pretty taxing process that usually lasts a few days.

This particular weekend has left me with a lot of questions, though. It’s making me realize how unhappy I am in my current situation. I generally don’t think about it, but it’s the only thing I’ve had to think about for a couple days. It’s no different from what it was yesterday or the day before that or the few years before that. As far as situations go, I shouldn’t complain. I have a job that pays the bills, a car that gets me from A to B, an apartment, and a few very close friends. That’s more than a lot of other people have. Most of my issues are mental (as if you couldn’t tell). I have a hard time putting them into words, though. I go on instinct. A lot of the time, I can’t really tell you why I do something or why I feel a certain way, it’s just my ample gut giving me the thumbs up or thumbs down. My gut has a moderately high success rate, I think. The downside to this is that if I want to try and evaluate my life and figure out how to make things better, it’s really hard. I can’t really put into words what the problem is and when I can’t define the problem, it’s damn near impossible to try and solve it. I think I was able to define a few key areas, though: passions, determination, ambitions, and the ‘how to not be so damn lonely because I’M REALLY FUCKING LONELY’ conundrum. I want to try to make a separate post about each of those. Not tonight, though, and probably not the next few nights because I’m hella busy. This blog is called ‘Illusion of progress’, after all, and was supposed to chronicle how I’m getting to who and what I want to be. Defining the issues is the first step, really. This post was meant to give a little insight into my head since the few people that I know that know about this blog don’t really get a whole lot of that from me.