Empathy

This is an awesome article:

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2014/01/how-to-love-an-empath/

I was told all my life that I “needed to grow a thick skin” that I was “too sensitive,” that I was “too emotional,” as if it were a bad thing I needed to eradicate from my life. Like the woman in the article, I tried everything to avoid feeling, to tamp out the heightened emotions that could render me giddy or tearful or terrified at a moment’s notice during social interactions and relationship trials. All to no avail.

It wasn’t until I became an adult and had a conversation with a musician friend of mine that I learned it wasn’t necessarily such an evil.

Because in my line of work, the capacity for emotion is an amazing gift. To be a good musician, I must feel, 100%, the joy, anguish, fear, comfort, tension, and release that we human beings are capable of. Because without those things, the music we make becomes lifeless and loses all ability to touch people’s souls. To be a musician means to feel.

Sure, it makes dealing with day-to-day life more hard than I’d care to admit. Unbelievably hard, sometimes.

But it’s all in how you look at it.

Tagged: anger, betrayal, Emotions, fear, joy, love, music, sensitivity