Ever since I was little I was in tune, but not overwhelmed, by peoples feelings. Everyone joked and said I was a future therapist. I was not aware that it was their feelings I felt but I thought they were my own unexplained random feelings.
Over the past three years it's gotten worse. I blamed it on hormones at first because I got really depressed and holed myself away in my room for a good year. Meanwhile while I was holing myself up, my family was going through very tough times with each other.
My middle sister is bi-polar and my eldest sister has ADHD. When I hung out with my oldest sister I was happy and she stopped her hyper ness that made me happy and hyper but if my middle sister came into the room and she wasn't in a good mood, my mood darkened and I didn't even need to see her face or hear her voice to know if she was in a bad mood.
I was and still kind of embarrassed by my ability to feel people's feelings and it's been getting worse lately. My best friend, who I spend almost everyday with, and I were talking in the library about a guy she liked. She was denying she liked him but I knew she was lying. So I told her that she did like him but she was denying it because she didn't want to get hurt again. And she agreed then began to talk more and more about him.
The next thing I knew my stomach was flipping, and tightening and my heart racing. It felt like I'd just fallen in love. I tried to ignore it but finally excused myself after I'd left the library the feelings dissipated. This wasn't the first time this had happened with her.
Later we were talking again and I felt it was time to tell her about all my experiences with seeing death, knowing thoughts, and feeling her feelings. She asked me how I knew they were her feelings so I explained how she felt that day and many others. She was freaked out but she expects it and doesn't think I'm crazy. She even encourages it!
So I began doing research and found empathic traits and I seemed to match up. For example, I love animals because they seem to like me a lot as well. I hate crowded rooms full of people, and drinking at a party, I tend to drink alone. But one trait that didn't match up was the one in which they said that empaths weren't very sociable. And I am, people feel at ease around me because I know what they want to hear. If I say something and I can feel them shift inwardly I know they don't like that subject so I quickly change it.
So one question: am I an empath or am I just crazy?
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