struggles of an overly empathetic child

Growing up, children generally tend to assume they're like everyone else, or, rather, everyone else is like them. Ideally we eventually outgrow that assumption, although depending on one's deviation from societal norms when they learn they are different from others can be as young as four or as old as university or beyond.

Obviously, children aren't born with the ability to empathize perfectly - that's why theory of the mind is a theory to begin with. We have to learn how to he empathetic, how to see from other people's perspectives even when they're not identical to one's own. Or, at least, most people have to learn that, even if not by being explicitly taught it. But by the literature and media we're exposed to, the people we interact with or even the animals, they all teach us something of how other experiences of the world differ from our own.

Now imagine if instead of having to imagine those experiences, instead of the internal lives of others being guesswork built from analyzing their behavior and expressions, one could actually feel what someone else feels viscerally. Imagine reacting to others' emotions without even being aware they weren't yours, as a child might not know that what they're experiencing is abnormal until the adults around them treat their reactions as such. A toddler throwing a tantrum because they want a toy will be inconsolable regardless of if they can sense their parents' frustration, anger, exhaustion, and effort to remind themselves 'they won't be this young forever'. No, the child is unlikely to know what exactly is wrong with them until they're at the point in development where, even for short moments in time, they're left alone.

Developmentally, young children have to be selfish - they are developing a sense of self in relation to the world around them. Even if one feels what their caregivers feel as well, their own emotions are likely to be so intense and overwhelming, the others might not register until later, or ever. Maybe the child becomes their mom in their dreams, too overwhelmed by the world in their waking life to consciously comprehend what they intake alongside their own experiences, or maybe they've been punished by reacting to an unexpressed emotion so now their mind hides those inputs until they're alone.

Maybe the child only learns explicitly what happens with them when they're in school, forced to interact with other children, emotions as intense or stronger than their own. Being picked in the middle of the team, but watching a boy nervous about being chosen last and suddenly the watcher too has sweating palms, a racing heart, the shame that comes when the boy's fear is reality like he knew it would be. The child consuming another's emotions doesn't know the rules to kickball, and their peers' frustration and joy depending on which team any one peer is on overwhelms the empathetic child completely until they're running to the only place they can be alone, the bathroom, external emotional input finally fading as they leave the area but the aftermath of knowing they're broken, failing at being a child, at recess, one of the only parts of the school day every other child anticipated excitedly, remaining in the lone child's mind.

Words were thrown around, and the child eventually found themself being tested by a strange adult doctor. The psychologist wasn't emotional, but their firm knowledge of what the test involved overwhelmed the child's own confusion about what was going on, almost as though a battle was being waged for control and the adult emotion was winning.

A diagnosis of autism was given, and the child was provided ways to dampen sensory overload. Unfortunately, the only way they were able to dampen the emotional overload was to avoid other people and their emotions altogether. The child did just that, easily exhausted, unsure of who they were besides 'happier alone'. The older the child grew, the darker the emotions surrounding them became, and not entirely due to their social isolation. Teenagers did have deeper wells of fury, desperation, desire than their childhood counterparts, and the empath's strategy for dealing with that was generally to try and do what they could as an unattached outsider to brighten the darkest moods around them. They hadn't gotten very good at breaking anger, but depression, even outright suicidality, well, being diagnosed as autistic meant the empath was put in social situations with other autistic teenagers, and many of them struggled with those feelings. The empath was able to at best distract the depressed teenager from their misery, gaining something of a class clown reputation by high school.

In their solitude, the empath threw themselves into books about emotions, psychology - well at first they began devouring their library's nonfiction section indiscriminately, aware from school that facts are often divorced from emotion, at least in many cases. In their psychology studies, the empath was half-hoping to find an answer, but they were not able to. Well, there were partial answers: mirror neurons, highly sensitive people, but the empath was unable to define themself in their research.

That was when they began writing, trying to find an outlet for the millions of external emotions that somehow wound up inside them. Their writing was how they ended up in university, again a place where many young adults learn what exactly makes them unique, if anything. The empath knew what made them unique; what they didn't know, what they were trying to write their way to an answer about, was who they were.

They majored in psychology and minored in creative writing, volunteering at their school's peer counseling service in hopes of helping others, since they already knew from failed friendships when they were young that long term interactions were doomed to eventually fail. People did not like being able to be read like billboards, and while the empath never outright mentioned their own problems, that very fact made potential friends distance themselves, feel like every interaction was one-sided.

In peer counseling the interactions were supposed to be one-sided, the person there needed support, and an empath is the perfect provider of said support. They may not know what a physics honors student is studying, but struggling with potentially failing a course was an emotional maelstrom the empath had survived plenty of other people, as well as having failed a fair few courses themself. Relationship struggles were similar, in that, although the empath had never been in any romantic relationships themself, they had been dealing with their parents' relationship to each other long before the empath developmentally equipped to deal with such struggles, and thus the empath had an innate sense of what typically went wrong in many romantic relationships.

The empath used their prior experiences having felt these emotions to help their peers cope with their own emotions surrounding their lives, both personal and academically.

The empath also at this period of time realized they were likely nonbinary. All the time they spent unattached to people, they spent writing, and they found through writing any gender could be made into a decent character. They also sometimes found themself feeling gender dysphoria surrounding their body, a fact they were able to confirm by being around transgender students at the university and comparing the emotions they felt when alone to the ones they ingested from trans students. Thus, the empath began using they/them pronouns and experimenting with gender expression, a fact their parents disapproved of but, as the empath was an adult, could not stop.

Their name had never felt quite right, a fact they initially attributed to their issues with identity - of course one's name felt odd when they're experiencing other people's emotions two thirds of the time! But now the dislike took on a new flavor, maybe because the empath was putting a name to these feelings around gender that had plagued them their whole life.

These were feelings they ignored easily because they were accustomed to ignoring their own emotions in favor of the larger emotions, in favor of people who needed them. Avoiding their own feelings was likely an unhealthy pattern, the empath reflected, hoping maybe by recognizing what was wrong, the process of changing it could begin. They knew from their studies that breaking patterns was never that easy, but they also knew they were an outlier in so many other ways being an outlier psychologically again would not be surprising. The empath was unsure of what a name they did resonate with would be. They would likely know it when they found it. They hoped their own emotions when they heard their name would be able resonate louder than the emotions of whoever was saying said name.