Flipping the switch

I spent the first two thirds of my life without empathy. Not that I was mean or lacked the ability to empathize, I just had no idea how to look outside myself and no sense that it would even be good to learn. This is all tangled up with a bunch of other things I had to wrestle with as I grew up, but the short story is that by the time I was around 40 years old I learned how to listen and how to attune myself to others' feelings.

This turns out to be a useful thing. Listening and understanding the feelings of others has applications in all kinds of things, even beyond the obvious stuff like being able to have a long-term relationship. It even comes in handy in many jobs.

Here's the problem with empathy, though. It's very hard to turn it off. It comes up all the time when dealing with the moods of adolescents, which applies to me both at home and at school so in other words, all the time. This is not a good thing. There are situations when I simply need to ignore others' moods and the urgent needs, but I have a very hard time doing so. I'm not writing to say I've figured it out, but I am working on it.