In Which Shani Unpacks her Apolitical Impulse

To me, the saddest truths about the world are sometimes too unbearable to think about -- I don't want to acknowledge everyone who is oppressed, silenced, terrorized or dominated because it feels like too much to carry (even the knowledge of it is too much to carry), and I'd rather not.  Sometimes I think I cannot.  So I close myself to portals-of-pain and try not to understand other subjectivities or other states of being.  And lately I've begun to see that I need friends, peers, coworkers and confidantes who will force me to look at, acknowledge and consider the hardest truths, and hopefully, against all of my inertia, act.  My natural inclination has always been toward apoliticism, but I don't want to be apolitical -- it's just a defense mechanism that I developed starting from my earliest encounters with oppression.

Here's a fact: partly cuz of my personality (I'm crazy about that categorizin' shit!) and partly cuz of how I grew up across continents, I have high capacity for empathy.  I don't mean I'm kind or empathetic (the opposite, usually), but if I choose to empathize, or if I begin empathizing against my will, I become completely replaced by the other person's subjectivity.  I almost totally lose my own feelings, thoughts and mental frameworks in the process of seeing through someone else's eyes.  I'm not exaggerating; it's true that sometimes I empathize with the wrong people, with the vapid or the vain or the the vicious people.  I can empathize with anyone who fascinates me enough that I adopt their stances and status and mental states.  Sometimes it happens in weird places -- at a bar, at a table playing cards, at dinner.  I will feel the walls of myself melting away, feel myself morphing into the mold of the other person; I begin interpreting the room, the gathering, the entire world as I think they would.  It can temporarily make me a stranger to myself.  It always happens when I fall in love, collapsing into the other person somehow.

Maybe then that explains why I shield myself, when I can, from the people in the greatest pain -- shield myself from their stories, their realities, their voices, for fear that I'll begin to identify with their aching hearts and bodies in the only involuntarily totalizing way I know how.  I'm so afraid that I'm becoming callous, that I've already become callous, in these efforts at emotional self-preservation.