For many chocolate lovers, it is hard to imagine not ever tasting chocolate. A chocolate lover may wonder how anyone could not just love chocolate and even feel sorry for those who have never experienced the delight on the taste buds from the sensation of chocolate. They may even feel guilty that some people in the world are deprived of the experience of tasting chocolate in all of its melting silky goodness.
For the person who has never experienced chocolate, they don’t think much about having it and don’t miss it. They have nothing to compare it too and therefore don’t even want it. For some who see others with the silky smooth chocolate but are deprived of it, the person who has never had the pleasure of experiencing the sensation of chocolate that others have, wonder why they can’t have chocolate while the rest of the world seems to be overflowing with chocolate in everything they consume. They begin to feel left out and different although they aren’t sure why.
Now, instead of chocolate, let’s put the abstract concept of emotions in its place. I have been trying to understand what it must be like to not have empathy or to feel compassion or even really experience genuine sympathy for others. I imagine that it must be like never experiencing chocolate of any kind, not even the unsweetened bitterness of natural chocolate. I felt so bad for those who can’t experience emotion. They can’t even imagine what it is like to actually experience emotion like I do. To me, I experience all of life through my emotions. If I can’t feel it, it is not real, it is not alive and it doesn’t really exist.
I have been trying to figure out why so many people see empathy as a sort of super power when it is a natural thing we are born with such as ears. It is a natural sense that everyone experiences right? Like sight, smell, touch, sound, and taste. It is natural and I think I can sort of try to understand what it must be like to have never experienced true sorrow, grief, loss, unconditional love for someone else or even guilt that only I can feel. If I think of emotions in a concrete sense such as chocolate instead of a natural abstract sense, It is almost imaginable. Only I feel bad for them because I have experienced emotions is all of its natural power and sensibility. I know the feeling of loss. But one can not miss something they have never experienced. One can not lose what they never had in the first place. If there is nothing to compare it to, it remains unknown and unlost.
I try to imagine how someone who has never experienced true emotion can not possibly understand the intensity of Love or guilt. They may ask why others are so upset about something. Why is Tina having such a problem with Delores’ death? She wasn’t close to her. Heck, they didn’t even speak the same language. But Tina suffered from grief and even her work performance suffered. Someone who can’t imagine what someone else is going through is because they have never experienced it. Not that they don’t experience their own self-centered emotions for themselves like whatever it is that they feel because they don’t have what others have. I am sure that for someone who hasn’t ever experienced deep emotions, it must feel like they are the odd one out. Or do they?
Do we see empathy as a super power because compassion and empathy and even sympathy are unusual? I have always thought that experiencing deep feelings and being able to experience what others are feeling was a normal part of being a human being. Compassion, empathy even deep love that never really goes away. The more I read about being an empath the more I am wondering why it is explained to be so abnormal to be empathic. I used to think it was because people have been desensitized through horror shows and television or the horrors of war.
I’m beginning to feel that maybe many of the people we call Monsters or Evil just never in their lives experienced emotions. For them, emotions are a natural kind of sense that they were simply born without. Some, I am certain, are desensitized, But what if people who enjoy torturing other living beings or are obsessed with gore or enjoy destroying the lives of others without feeling any guilt for what they do, just don’t know what it is like to suffer in an emotional way?
If one can not imagine the pleasure to have chocolate, why would they even begin to understand the loss of having it taken away?
Life as a sociopath must be like Life without Chocolate.
In Perfect Love and Perfect Peace,
May you feel deeply the bittersweetness of empathy for it is what makes us the being we are.
