Heartsick

12182016 Heartsick 

Merriam Webster’s initial definition of heartsick is “very despondent, depressed.”  However, that’s not enough to accurately describe the condition of my heart.  I dig deeper.  Wikipedia defines heartsick as “despondent, typically from grief or loss of love”.  Urban dictionary defines it as, “to feel dull, or an ache, heavy, tight or otherwise unwell in your heart. Occurs when someone you love is far away, or you’ve done something to hurt them and you don’t know how you’ll fix it, or when fate conspires to keep you apart, or in any less serious but just as pathetically painful situation.” 

As I write what I’m processing, please hear this most important state of my current emotion very clearly: I’m not in danger, I’m not going to hurt myself or someone else.  There is no need to worry more about me than you did last week.  I’m fine.  I will be fine.  God is still God, and He is still Good; and God is good at being God.  Hear my faith, hear my love, hear my spirit.  At the end of this piece, I hope you will hear the resonant sound of hope.  But until then, this is my heart’s sickness. 

#1 Fact: I am grieving.  More than one thing.  The holidays bring all kinds of emotions.  On Thanksgiving, I told the truth about my holiday anxiety, which comes from the understanding of expectations and the realization that I will never meet them, whether imposed by others or self.  My desire to make holidays special times for my children is constantly overshadowed by the perfect ways other families celebrate.  Whether by hearing it from friends and family, or by seeing it on my social media feed, I am bombarded with the image of perfection and my own insecurity of being less than so.  While related, anxiety isn’t grief.  I am grieving because I haven’t seen some of my students in weeks.  I am grieving because I miss my sister-by-choice-friend and I wish I were heading south again this year.  I am grieving because my husband changed jobs and change is hard for me.  I am grieving because I lost a friend this year.  I am grieving because I made some mistakes this year.  I am grieving because I wasn’t obedient in some things.  I am grieving the loss of a friend.  I am grieving the loss of my perceived status.  I am grieving and that’s a fact. 

#2 Fact:  I am an Empath.  If you’ve never heard that term used in any reference other than psychics, please hear this – I am not a psychic.  I do not know what you are thinking, and I can’t pick out the winning lottery number.  I don’t do palm readings or any dark magic. I am empathetic to people and their energy.  I am unnervingly sensitive to people’s secret emotions.  I sense things about people that they are currently or have hidden in the past.  I can often predict what a person is thinking or feeling about things before they make an outward physical action to confirm my intuition.  Ever since I went on a trip to Adventureland as a teenager, I have disliked great crowds.  I often tell people that I am “paranoid” in crowds and have great anxiety.  Those are true statements, but even more important is that when I am in a crowd, I feel all the energy from people – I feel when a parent is struggling or when a child is sad, even if they are in a theme park and seem fine.  When there are thousands of people in a small space, it is difficult to figure out who is feeling what, and so it becomes uncomfortable for me.  Being an Empath also makes it difficult to distinguish whose feelings I am sensing.  Are they someone else’s or do they belong to me?  I know that sounds a bit odd, (how could I not know what I am feeling) but here’s another example from my childhood… 

There was a little boy in our church who was around 2 or 3 years old; he didn’t talk much yet was happy and seemed to enjoy dancing and singing in our children’s choir time before Sunday school.  One day, I was around fourteen, the pastor came into the choir area, and that little boy started screaming and crying.  I didn’t know why, but I felt deep in my spirit that the little boy was being terrorized by our pastor.  At 14 in a nuclear family, residing in a small Midwestern town, I was pleasantly shielded from crime information about the outside world.  How could I know to sense or interpret his crying and screaming as more than a tantrum?  What would make me feel sick inside to the point I could hardly breathe?  Anger, so powerful, I felt hot and as if I were screaming on the inside.  I was in church.  I was safe and fine.  There were no kids fighting or arguing, and I was certainly in no danger.  There was nothing to be anxious or uneasy about and I had nothing to be angry about.  Why would my focus be on the pastor?  He had been a decent person to me.  I don’t know, and I can’t explain it, which is the most challenging part of being an Empath.  What I found out later was that the pastor had been sexually molesting that little boy.  It was as awful to hear the truth that I had sensed something very real, as it was to feel that sensation of terror. 

That’s what an Empath deals with.  It isn’t comfortable and the feelings are often not good ones.  Recently, I was delighted to have a sense that was pleasant.  I sensed that someone in my close circle was pregnant.  I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months, she didn’t post anything online or give any hints to the fact.  She didn’t even look different.  I just had a “feeling”.  I asked her about it but was told no.  Imagine my delight when, months later, the happy news was announced!  I’m not psychic.  I just have very deep knowledge.  Now, that will turn some people off, even make them want to avoid me.  But I don’t have to be in the physical presence of someone to know that there is a secret emotion or hurt.  Sometimes, I just have an intuitive sense. 

I was completely asleep when my aunt’s name came into my mind.  I woke and prayed.  It was 2 am, not exactly the time when I needed to start calling around to find out what was going on.  In the morning, I told my mom what had happened, and later in the day found out that at exactly that time, my aunt was dealing with her mother-in-law’s health crisis.  She needed someone.  I have a tough time reconciling what the physical world calls being an Empath to being spiritually obedient sometimes.  The thing with my aunt, I call divine appointment.  God knew that I would obey when He spoke her name into my heart, even though I had no idea why. 

I believe that my being an Empath is less a coincidence than a gift from God.  I know that there is research that shows empathy as a part of our biological makeup and that we learn some of the characteristics of empathy from those who teach us to be kind and compassionate to others.  However, being biologically predisposed and taught to care for others and knowing that what is happening is a direct result of a spiritual gift and was purposefully placed in me by a loving God, is at times, a juxtaposition of being both physical and spiritual.  A cohesive contradiction that can be extremely tiring when I get so involved in the spiritual that it disrupts my physical; and vice versa. 

Fact #3: People around me are hurting.  I’ve said it before. Because I’m an empath, the fact that people closest to me are hurting makes me hurt. Which makes me heart sick. I’m hurting for them, for their hurt, for their grief. This kind of heart sickness doesn’t hurt me, it just makes me feel incredibly sad. How one might feel when like when you can see that something is damaged and you want to repair it, but there is no way it could ever be restored to its original condition. Yes, an unfixable kind of sadness that isn’t really mine, but I’ll hold it for a while.

All these things are factual reasoning for my heart’s sickness. One might feel deep despair when having this much weight on one’s heart, but I do not feel despair. I feel comforted by the confidence that God will make something beautiful from this sadness, this heart sickness. I know in my soul that better days will come. So, as I sit here and type this, I am at peace knowing that holding the heart sick sadness and grief of someone else is indeed an act of love. While I can never repair things to the way they were before or restore hearts, God can. He will. Until then, I’ll just wait and hold on. I hope anyone feeling heart sick will hear this last paragraph:

He loves us. So much so that He took the shape of a human to help us see that He is with us. He walks with us, talks with us, and shares in the feelings and experiences of being human. He is perfect though and can heal us and save us and restore us. And He does. Because He loves us. So, if your heart is sick, please wait. He’s coming.