Losing empathy

I think of times where I sat at the same table with a group of amazing people and felt so absent. Even though aware of my surroundings — I heard their low frequencies, fluctuating pitches and giggles. I read their faces and their lips and body languages. I stared and tried to stay focused on putting together their speech puzzle . I smelled their booze breath and I struggled to be present before I floating out of context. I was there on the table. But also I wasn’t.

These times spent at dinner tables strummed with sound waves I cannot ride are supposed to be where I ride along and learn. They are chances of meeting new people, making connections and re-visiting social circles. It is essential for humans to connect with others even if the conversations are complaints about the weather or traffic. Actually, for me, during these times I am lethally disoriented, a whinny line about the weather would bring me back to the room.

But even the most repetitive conversations, I’d still get them distorted or muffled by the noise and distance. It upsets me that I often leave big gathering only with a distorted mental pile of dictions rather than complete anecdotes. There are millions of other stories out there that I can read and understand deeply, but they do not equate with hearing things from others with their soundbites, breath pauses and oscillating tones.

That’s what I am missing out. I leave these gathering with an auditory blank memory and but a visual one of faces’ that I could have connected with or known better.

I have slowly come to the discomforting realization that I am losing empathy for others, only because I cannot really hear them. In a recent review in Nature Neuroscience by a team of researchers, empathy comes in three stages in something they call an empathetic continuum where one has to feel towards others and also understand them. How can I feel towards something I don’t know, in a place that I am not really present at?

Back home from a gathering, this means that I am also back from my float between my inner-world and the real one out there. I come back from the space where sounds get lost in translation and where I lose all forms of human connection.