Empathy--Gift or Curse?

Well before I get into my real reason for blogging today, I'd like to turn your attention to the left side of the page. Over there (*head nod to the left*) and down a little. Under "books read". I finished another one! Man, this goal to read more has been the easiest goal to keep in my life! Love Walked In is magnificent. It took me a few chapters to get used to the narrator's personality because she's a bit quirky, which I ended up loving. Anyway, it's a book about true love and not just in the cheesy sense. The second half of the book kept me teary-eyed through most of it.

Speaking of teary-eyed... I'm one of those people that cry simply because someone else is crying. It doesn't matter if I know the person well or if they're a stranger, if I relate to their struggle or hardly understand it. When people cry, I cry. Now I'm not going to try to convince you that I am a warm-hearted angel of an individual. I'm not. I can be mean and callous and sometimes even intentionally hurt people, though I can say with a clear conscience that those times are few and far between. But if there is one gentle fact about my personality that I am sure of, it's that I'm empathetic. I'm pretty sure I always have been.

While it's helpful to have something on hand that you like about yourself (without sifting through the under-achiever or obsessive personality or bad with money), it's also sometimes a difficult aspect of my personality to deal with. It gets frustrating feeling people hurt so vividly when you can't do anything to fix it, feeling the desire of someone who wants something SO BADLY but you can't help them get it.

Right now there's a girl on my squad that's struggling. Down the road she might look back on this trial as trivial and juvenile, but it's very real to her right now. Because I care about her, the struggle feels like my own. But even more so, because I'm over her as a coach and the problem stems from within the squad, I feel like I should be able to do something. Which makes it all the more frustrating to know that I can't.

I don't think I'm actually going anywhere with this, so I'll stop. Just thought a little word vomit would help clear my head. :) Adios.