Empathy and Sympathy

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I've never heard of that before.

Empathy is being into the story of other people's lives, and being able to follow the thread... and being into it, and interested, and caring about it, and understanding the twists and turns. Aspies are notoriously poor at this.

Sympathy is a feeling we get about the immediate situation that some other being finds itself.

... or so it seems to me.

it is now 4 am and i am again tired, but i will reply in a abridged way.

i do not identify in the slightest with actors because i can see that they are memorizing a script that they did not create. they never say "um" or "err". they never take more than an instant to reply to who they are talking to. when other actors say their lines.
the actors who are in focus always have an immediate response, and it is always their final sentiment, and they never rethink it and change what their response is. i can see that actors are just waiting for other actors to finish their lines, and then they immediately sprout their reply seemingly without any ruminating consideration,




i have nothing to say about that that is empathetic. a girl i know (not tammy but sonia) rings me up often to lament about how her sister belittles her because she has no children or husband. i ask her if she feels inadequate because she is not married and does not have kids, and she replies that she does not want to be married or ever have children.

i wonder then why she is emotionally affected by the words of someone who is not like her, and she says that she feels inferior and ineffective due to her sisters appraisal of her. i can not understand personally how she can be affected by the thoughts of someone who she does not want to be like.

if anyone does not like me, and if they say unkind things about me, i could not care less. i do not want to be in their world anyway, and as long as they can not harm me, i ignore them.

sonia seems to be placated by my attitude, but then she will ring the next day and grizzle again about how she is not respected. again i say that it is only by those who she does not want to be like that she is rejected. some people need the infrastructure of other people's approval to reinforce their own soul, and she is one of those people.

other people can not reinforce my soul because i will do as i please without reference to external reinforcement, and i feel free because of that. i know that my words are not salvation for sonia because she is different than me, and while i wish to placate her, essentially she is built differently than i am. i do not feel in any way guilty that i can not rescue her, because the ropes from my ship are not the ropes she needs to hang onto to find her happiness. i am very stark and solitary, but i am always content, and i feel sorry for her ("sympathy"), but i can not intrinsically understand how she feels because i would not feel as she does if i were in her situation. if i were in her situation i would tell the sister to talk elsewhere and spend her efforts elsewise because i am not interested. but i can see sonia is hurting badly and i do not like to see her hurting.

it is not your fault that others are suffering and that is the main thing. if you caused people to feel bad by some sort of psychopathic arrogance and trampled on their hopes, then you should surely apologize to god. but if you merely are ill equipped to rescue them, then it is simply that "god" did not endow you with the ability to rescue others from their whirlpools of despair.

i do not feel guilty about anything. i actually can not feel "guilt" i was told when i was a child, but i can understand that it is very wrong to cause grief to others by being greedy or conceited.



i am very bad at reading people's facial expressions. crying looks like laughing to me often.
when i was 7, i was at home and we (sisters and parents) were watching a tv show (that i was only partially attendant to), and some woman received a telephone call that informed her that her son had just died, and she went into a spasm where she undulated her belly in a rhythmic fashion and grimaced, and she showed her teeth, and it looked to me as if she was laughing, and i asked why she was laughing, and my family was horrified that i saw it that way.

i am unaffected by people's moods because i live in my own world, and i can not determine what people are feeling.



i do not have moods or emotions. i do not know what the distinction between them is, but i am always always indifferent. my psychiatrist told me that i have only 4 emotional variants. they are "happy" and "sad" and "scared" and "angry".

she told me that my "happiness" is simple and consists of only "complacency" (i do not feel elation)
my "sadness" is simple and consists only of "dissatisfaction" (i do not feel depression or grief).
my "scared" consists only of simple "uncertainty" (i do not feel horror).
and my "anger" consists of only "frustration" (i do not feel rage or vengeance).


sorry it is late and i have rambled, but i told you i would reply and i did.

now i am going to succumb to gravity and flop into bed. bye. no need to reply

I really like this description. I can feel the gradients between the feelings and moods most times, but when I'm worn out, tired, or just don't care it's as though my world falls into this simple, basic description of things. (This is also usually when people say my face has gone emotionless, which seems to confuse other people, and I describe my feeling as merely, "fine".) Your description has captured that very clearly. Thank you.

This is pretty accurate in my own experiences.

I feel something fairly unique too, when humor is involved. I can only assume it is an emotion, really, and do not know what to label it as. It is a good emotion, I enjoy feeling that way. It is more intense than simple complacency...hmm.

I remember feeling rage once though, or something similar to it, when I was a very small child. I only have the one moment of recollection of that particular emotion, however. So I speculate I am capable of it, but the threshold to enter into that emotional state must be extremely high.

Even still, very accurate description, I like it.