seven
The Empath
From my earliest memories, I can remember sensing emotion, pain, and suffering in others. People have often remarked about my hypersensitivity and my empathy as if I exist on an altogether different frequency. I can’t avoid seeing and feeling the suffering of certain people. In my adult life, I’ve found ways to manage the emotions and energy that I soak up, while navigating my own persistent experience with suffering and depression.
Depression and empathy have become synergistic for me. I fight my depression because it doesn’t feel good to suffer. I’m self-critical when the depression takes hold; I feel guilty for surrendering to sadness and exhaustion. But I’m learning to accept my depression. It’s a part of who I am and who I’ve been since my pre-teen years.
I would like to think that what we feel is complex and beyond a binary understanding of emotional subjectivity. My feelings are more grey than black or white, in between instead of good or bad, happy or sad. I’m sure that many people connect with the grey area of feelings. If I continue with this line of thinking, then my depression is neither good nor bad; it just is. I can’t control my depression, but I can work to alleviate my suffering by minimizing my resistance to it. I suffer greatly in trying to resist depression because by doing so I’m trying to control it. I can’t control my depression or my empathy. I have been told many times in my life that I should try not to be depressed, as if I can simply flip a switch through sheer willpower. Accepting my mental illness is not about surrendering to it and letting it ruin my life. Instead, accepting it as a part of who I am allows me to work through my feelings. My depression opens many empathic windows to affect other people in positive ways by extending compassion.
Why do I try to explain or rationalize my depression? Why do I need to understand why I feel depressed? I guess I’m trying to find comfort by understanding the darkness and numbing sadness that can work their way into my life to suffocate my clarity, my happiness, and my outlook. I don’t know exactly why I have to deal with depression more days than not, and I don’t think it truly matters where my depression comes from in order to accept it as a part of who I am. My depression is part of my existence in this world. To some extent, it has always been with me. It is a part of me, but it isn’t all of me, and it doesn’t completely define me. For once in my life, I would like to be fine with accepting the fact that depression is part of my life.
I experience gender dysphoria alongside my depression to varying degrees every day, but let me be clear that my gender dysphoria is not a mental illness. Dysphoria relates to both thinking and feeling, the latter being slightly more difficult to explain. There is a disconnect between the feelings I have about my gender, the state of my body, and my ability to feel whole as a human being. The wholeness that is achieved when I feel less dysphoric is spiritual. I feel one with energy and humanity when I feel together, less uneasy about the relationship between my mind and my body. Being fluid is like being out of the social order, but in a healthy, liberating way with room to breathe, since being socially ordered can feel suffocating. Tapping into a fluid gendered subjectivity gives me space to connect with my body, mind, and self because everything is in constant change. Dysphoria is a part of my process; it makes me aware of the subtle shifts, and it prompts me to be fluid and open beyond the cultural constructs that aim to reduce me to a simplified entity.
I can’t always decipher emotions that I’m feeling, or the feelings of others that I’ve absorbed without really being aware that it’s happened. I can sense thin layers of energy that separate me from other people. We are all made up of a variety of energetic forces that come from the same source. Beyond the energy and emotion existing in every human being, my experience with empathy, and later spirituality, was shaped by the suffering of those around me, especially the people closest to me.
Recently, my mom said, “Joshua, I treated you like glass when you were a baby.” I spent a lot of time thinking about those words, trying to understand their meaning. Had she been afraid to break me because of her own childhood and adolescent trauma? Had I really been that delicate, or sensitive, to be broken so easily? I was her first child. My parents treated me carefully. Yet I can’t help but think that this metaphor signifies an empathy that I demonstrated from a young age; she might have understood that even as a small child I could sense her feelings.
My mom balanced the world around her in a way that hid the enormity of what she was actually doing for our family. I still find it difficult to explain how she managed to care for us while working full-time as a psychiatric nurse. She was always working, it seemed. Her job at the hospital required her to work a chaotic shift rotation of early mornings, afternoons, and nights, and still she managed to keep the house clean and tidy, drive me and my siblings to all of our various extracurricular activities, manage a small business with my dad, extend emotional support to me, and even volunteer at our elementary school. My dad certainly helped with everything. But my mom seemed to carry a weight and responsibility that, though it was always obvious to me, I never fully appreciated until I became an adult.
Her depressive episodes weren’t as apparent to me while I was growing up. She hid that side of herself from us. It must have taken an enormous toll to wear that mask whenever her depression got bad. My mom went above and beyond. She is the exemplar of motherhood in my eyes. She saved my life, many times. I’m not so sure that I would have been able to survive everything — all of the bullying and suffering — without a mother who loved me as much as she did, and continues to do. She sacrificed part of her own happiness and mental well-being for me and my brothers. I know it.
When I was in my late teens, nearing the end of high school, I started to sense a disconnect in my parents’ relationship. Something sad and ominous had emerged. My mom began going out late at night after working an eight- or even twelve-hour shift and coming home at one or two in the morning. Sitting in our cold garage like a gargoyle, cemented in place by my concern, I would wait for her to get home. I needed to be there for my mom in those moments, to make sure she got home safely from whatever it was she was doing out so late. I knew what was happening, but I didn’t want to admit it. I wanted her to tell me and to tell our family. I had watched enough drama on film and TV at that point to know what can happen to a marriage.
One night, when I was eighteen years old, she came home at about one in the morning and found me sitting on the stairs in our garage, chain-smoking. It was a cold winter night. She drove her car into the garage, and I could sense that she was scared to see me. I could see the sadness in her eyes. Perhaps she was afraid to reveal to her teenage child what was really happening during those late-night adventures. What parent wants to talk with their child about an affair?
I was feeling her absence for the first time in my life, and at eighteen I thought I had a right to know why she was suddenly disappearing. I wanted to know what was going on. I knew she wasn’t happy, but why wasn’t she happy? Did she no longer want to be our mother? What propelled her to take such risks, driving home late at night with booze on her breath? And why was she suddenly not there for my younger brothers, who needed her as much, possibly even more, than me? I didn’t want my family to fall apart. So much of my life had already been difficult enough, and I was depending on the stability of our family.
She walked up the stairs towards me. Part of my mom was absent in that moment; she had disconnected to protect herself, and possibly to protect me from the truth. I looked down at her, visibly shaken, and asked her to tell me what was going on.
“Are you cheating on Dad? I’ll understand if you aren’t happy, but you can’t lie to me. Please tell me the truth. I won’t forgive you if you lie to me.”
Her answer to my question haunted me, and our relationship, for years. She brushed past me and said that, no, she wasn’t having an affair. It was an obvious lie; her eyes told the real story. I felt betrayed.
Finishing my cigarette, I sat there alone for a moment, cold and confused. She had lied to keep me safe the only way she knew how. What was happening in her life was too mature and complex to share with me, and it was also private.
I followed her into the house and my dad came out of their bedroom. He must have been waiting for her to come home as well. I stood in the kitchen feeling trapped inside a triangle of emotions, with my parents standing, apart from one another, in our home where we had spent over a decade eating, laughing, and sharing our lives. The space suddenly turned dark. Those memories were now in the past, and this was my present, with my two younger brothers sleeping soundly, unaware of what faced us, downstairs. I couldn’t escape the reality of my parents’ fracturing relationship, and how the cracks in their foundation would affect me, Adam, and James. There weren’t many words used that night. Nothing was revealed, yet I had a feeling that everything had been said.
The year that followed was a living nightmare, as our family’s story entered an even darker phase. The end of their marriage was marked by a story of betrayal that seems almost fictional. It was a tale written with my dad’s depression and his broken heart, and the extreme guilt that my mom felt for leaving him, and our family, for someone else. When the truth finally came out, my dad was utterly devastated. I understood the betrayal he felt because my mom had kept the affair hidden from him.
During a sunny fall day, the skies went dark on our family. Our tiny neighbourhood in Napanee was transformed into what must have looked like a movie set to people driving by. Dozens of police officers surrounded our countryside home and cordoned off our street. Their mission: to save my dad’s life.
My dad had locked himself in his bedroom. In fact, the door had been locked the night before, and as I’d made my way to bed I’d heard his loud cries as he talked on the phone with a counsellor. He’d spent months on end shut in that room. At first, if I asked, he would let me in to be there for him, to support him. But in those final few days before the suicide attempt he had completely isolated himself.
I knew there were guns in the house for my parents’ hunting adventures for moose, deer, and duck. When I knocked on the door that dark morning, he yelled out that he was going to take his own life with a shotgun. You can never free yourself from the feelings that are created when a parent tells you they are going to end their life. It sticks with you, it shapes you, and opens you up to feeling what someone you love is feeling.
The pain and the sudden grief were sharp and might easily have frozen me in place. But the survivor in me immediately thought of my brothers. They were young and they were afraid. I needed to be there for them. I needed to control this situation. I called 911. The response was fast. I gathered James and Adam and we spent almost an hour, what really seemed like forever, waiting across the street at our neighbours’ house, standing in their yard, me chain-smoking, all of us staring across the road at our home and the dozens of police officers gathered there.
I felt an instinctive urge to think about the situation more deeply, to analyze this nightmare in front of me. How could we lose our father like this? We couldn’t. What was really going on? Then I realized that the shotgun might have been an excuse to get me and my brothers out of the house. My empathic connection with him, already strong from weeks of being close to his suffering in our home, made me realize that he had likely taken pills that were kept in the en suite bathroom.
I ran down the neighbours’ long driveway to a police officer conveniently parked at the end, likely posted there to keep me and my brothers away from anything that might have happened at our home that day. Out of breath, I explained that my dad had taken a bottle of pills and they would need to get him medical help before he overdosed. The police reacted quickly. They told me they were listening in on the phone, and my dad had been trying to call my mom at work. His voice had sounded drugged.
I made my way back up the driveway to be with my brothers and our neighbours, and then we received a call. He was telling us on the phone why he couldn’t continue. He took turns saying goodbye to each of us. That goodbye will stay with me forever. I never thought I would hear his goodbye until I was old. This was happening too fast. He couldn’t leave us behind.
I knew the officers were listening in on the call, so I told him directly that I knew he wasn’t going to use the gun, if there was even one there, and that he had taken pills. He admitted it, and minutes later we saw the officers carrying him out our front door on a stretcher and putting him into an ambulance. It all came down to that moment. Was he still alive?
He told us later that the phone call with us had woken him up. He’d decided he wasn’t going to die like that. With what little strength he had left, he would try to save himself. He told the officers that he would open the door, and when he did they pushed him to the ground, unsure if he had a gun or not, and called in the paramedics to give him emergency medical attention. The ambulance rushed him to the hospital. Me, my brothers, the officers, the paramedics, doctors, even my dad: we all played a part in saving his life that day.
I sat on a bed that evening in the home of one of my father’s friends. With the door closed and an address book in front of me, I called dozens of people, family members and my parents’ friends, explaining what had happened and reaching out for support. I spent hours on the phone talking about the incident over and over again until it became a script that I was reading. I became emotionally detached — I had to in order to remain composed and deal with a responsibility beyond what would typically be expected of an eighteen-year-old.
I still feel that day as if it happened yesterday. I don’t blame my dad. I forgive him. I understand why he called out for help. And his suicide attempt brought me closer to him and his feelings. It strengthened my bond with him, which hasn’t always been solid, and it made me feel a depth of suffering that enriched me as a human being, helping me to see and be there for people I love as the empath that I’ve come to be.
That wasn’t the end of the nightmare that month for me and my brothers. Three weeks later, at the end of her emotional rope, my mom sat in her car looking down at the contents of a bottle of clonazepam tablets sprayed out across her hand. She was considering taking her own life. She was suffering from severe depression from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder and the guilt she was feeling about my dad’s suicide attempt, and now she was experiencing suicidal ideation herself. She, thankfully, had a last-minute change of heart, thinking of me and my brothers. She called to admit herself to a psychiatric ward. I only recently learned this part of the story when I opened up the memory to write this out.
That month, my brothers and I had to visit both of our parents in the hospital. My mom ended up in psychiatric care, which was where health care professionals finally, thankfully, discovered that she had bipolar disorder. In their absence, I assumed the position of caretaker for my brothers for months while trying to finish my final year of high school.
Visiting my mother in the hospital gave me the opportunity to see her vulnerability. She was normally so strong, so composed and controlled. She had wrapped herself up to contain the trauma of her own life in order to take care of us. Her weakened state was paired with a power. After all, she had saved herself in a very lonely place, guilt-ridden and ashamed. She never wanted to hurt us. She never wanted to hurt my dad. I was proud of her for surviving her suicidal thoughts, burdened by the instability of her illness.
You never entirely move on from your father telling you goodbye on the phone and talking about a shotgun while you are forced to watch from one hundred feet away, at the neighbours’ house, after he has swallowed a bottle of pills. And you don’t ever get over seeing your mother suffering from her mental illness in the wing of a psychiatric ward. She was always so strong, and she fell apart into unrecognizable pieces.
I was eighteen years old when we almost lost both of our parents in the same month. Ours had been a picture-book, small-town family
— albeit one with a queer child — but then everything changed. The story, our story, swiftly spread through the rumour mill of the town. We had been known for notable academic, athletic, and creative accomplishments. My parents were successful people with professional careers and a small, profitable business on the side. They hosted many lovely dinner parties with their many friends and made vital contributions to the school and the community. Then everything fell apart — their marriage, our home, and my relationship with both of them.
Today, my dad feels a potent mixture of shame, guilt, and embarrassment. He has a difficult time talking about that time of his life, and how it affected me and my brothers. The end of my parents’ relationship, the way that it played out, took a significant emotional toll on him. It would have exacted a significant toll on anyone. Within a short period of time, he lost everything that he had built over decades with our family. He witnessed his whole life crumbling before his eyes. The weight that men carry in our culture can sometimes be suffocating and overwhelming. There is a pressure to uphold expectations, to hide the vulnerability and emotion that all human beings should be able to experience without guilt. His shame is a spectre that is a difficult and traumatic part of his history and our family’s history to this day. But I’m also proud of the way he has transformed from the darkest day in his life.
After my dad’s suicide attempt, his counsellor told him something that bears remarkable similarity to my own experience of reclaiming myself through the power of spirit and empathy. The counsellor told him to find “little Mark” again, just as I have had to reclaim “little Joshua” to be who I am. My dad was lost to himself from the decades spent in what he sees as a codependent relationship. It is a powerful practice to reconnect with who we were prior to a lifetime of repeated trauma and increasing dependency.
Me, Myself, They Page 10