Are you an empath? Have you always wanted to be one? Or do you hate those people as much as you hate mimes?
I’ve always thought I might be an empath. I think I’m pretty empathetic, or at least I try to be when it seems like I should be, but a full-blown empath? I’m not sure now.
An empath is someone who is highly aware of the emotions of those around them, to the point of feeling those emotions themselves. Empaths see the world differently than other people; they’re keenly aware of others, their pain points, and what they need emotionally.
But it’s not just emotions. According to Dr. Judith Orloff, author of The Empath’s Survival Guide, empaths can feel physical pain, too — and can often sense someone’s intentions or where they’re coming from. In other words, empaths seem to pick up on many of the lived experience of those around them.
Relatively speaking, I’ve had an easy life. I rarely get into talking about it, mainly because I know so many others haven’t and are still suffering. I’ve been told I can’t possibly relate to someone’s misery if I haven’t experienced anything on the same level, but I think it’s the opposite. I think many people like me are more horrified at stories of abuse and neglect because we haven’t normalized it. We don’t see degrees of pain, we only see unimaginable pain.
I’m teased a lot because I hate horror movies and can’t watch violence as entertainment. They stay with me and haunt me. I don’t understand the appeal and if it wasn’t that people I love do seem to love them, I’d probably stay clear away from anyone sick enough to find pleasure in them.
So imagine my surprise when I read Number six of the 13 bullet points from the article above:
6. Tragic or violent events on TV can completely incapacitate you
If you’re an empath, it doesn’t matter that a horrible event isn’t happening to you, you still feel it through your entire being. You may seem to “live through” the pain or loss of the event yourself, even if you’re thousands of miles away — or indeed, even if it’s a fictional event in a show. This reaction can be completely overwhelming at times.
Empaths, like HSPs, may not do well watching violence or human tragedy, even if it’s a movie that others find gripping.
There are other points on that list I can see myself doing and being, but I don’t fit into all of them. Solo goes on to say:
So I’m just going to go on being who I am without the labels and hope for the best. Because now I’m confused and I’m trying not to be emotional about it…
Walt Disney walks on the bridge in front of the partially finished Sleeping Beauty's Castle at Disneyland. Credit: AP Images
Well, this was fun! (See below) It brought back a lot of memories, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
PBS’ American Experience did a story on Walt Disney’s complete reconstruction of what an amusement park should be when he designed Disneyland and built it on160 acres of orange groves in sleepy Anaheim, California. It was the start of theme parks as we know them today, and if you’ve ever shelled out the big bucks to get inside one, well, TRIGGER WARNING: I beg you to skip this next part.
When it first opened, visitors could explore the parks’ four unique lands and stroll down the all-American Main Street, U.S.A. for an admission fee of $1. Ride tickets were extra – between 10 and 30 cents each. Within four months, however, Disneyland began selling ticket books for $2.50 that covered both the price of admission and eight ride attractions, among them Snow White’s Scary Adventures, the Mad Tea Party, and the Jungle Cruise.
Okay, now back to me: Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955 and we made our first trip there on March 19, 1957. How do I remember the exact date? Because I was very pregnant, due within a couple of weeks, and my mother-in-law and sister-in-law had made a train trip from Michigan to Antelope Valley to help out when the Big Day came.
They brought along their young kids, who, of course, wanted to go to Disneyland, and they thought they could go without me, but I wasn’t having it. Nosiree! We lived in the Mojave Desert, a couple of hours away, so it was a long, long day trip, and I made the most of it. I knew my freedom days would be over once the little one came along and I threw all caution to the winds, never once listening to all the grumbling going on about how I never should have made that long, exceedingly hot trip.
So around two in the morning I started having pains. Around 6 AM my water broke, and eight hours after that Susan Elizabeth made her appearance, no doubt pissed that she’d been to Disneyland and couldn’t see a thing.
Georgia O’Keeffe was one tough artist—a curmudgeon even—so it tickled me no end when I read this in an article by Alexxa Gotthardt at Artsy.net.
O’Keeffe worked in an era when many competitive artists considered terms like “beautiful” or “pretty” an insult to their work. But O’Keeffe didn’t agree—she wanted to depict the beauty of nature and use sumptuous colors, despite an opposing trend among the circle of artists she moved in. “I’m one of the few artists, maybe the only one today, who is willing to talk about my work as pretty,” she once said. “I don’t mind it being pretty.”
In particular, her male counterparts weren’t fans of her vibrant palette. “The men didn’t like my color. My color was hopeless. My color was too bright,” she remembered. But again, she paid no mind to their criticism. “I liked colors,” she stated, resolutely.
And speaking of Georgia, did she paint vaginas? I never thought so but what do I know? I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who thought it was kind of silly. Georgia herself didn’t think so, either.
The easy answer is no. The first person to describe O’Keeffe’s abstracts and flower paintings as ladybits was her own husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. His photographs of O’Keeffe, including a series of nudes, appear in this exhibition. He encouraged her to read Sigmund Freud and see the erotic symbolism in her work.
Then, feminist artists in the 1970s like Judy Chicago saw in O’Keeffe’s work a radical embracing of the female form that totally fit in with their view of gender politics. They felt like O’Keeffe was one of them, and took the whole vagina thing and ran with it.
But throughout her 60-year career, O’Keeffe strenuously and repeatedly denied that her work had anything to do with the erotic. She felt that people were just reading their own obsessions into the work. For her, these were works of nature and abstraction, pure and simple.
So see what you want to see, but if they all look beautiful to you, join the club.
But sometimes art isn’t pretty. Sometimes it becomes a form of activism, fraught with meaning in ways only the artist can envision. In this piece by Jack Herrera for CJR, Showing Up, The Revelatory Art of Minerva Cuevas, I couldn’t get enough of this story. Gorgeous writing, awesome art, and the feeling that this is how we win: We get to the guts of the story by creating a canvas we can’t ignore.
Minerva Cuevas is a Mexican artist who spent time at our border crossings and saw first hand the pain and the indignities suffered by those people whose only crime is seeking a better life in a place that promised to be safer than the place they had to leave.
Herrera writes:
The piece was called Río Bravo Crossing. On a wall, a projector showed images of a woman standing in a large river. As gray-blue water lapped at the shore, the woman moved across the length of the river, painting a white streak across stones in the current. She left behind a single line, broken up by the water, that appeared to stretch out over the rocks and, eventually, the length of the river. The paint appeared so natural in the desert landscape that it could have been a geological occurrence. When she reached the far end of the river, the woman—Cuevas—had walked southward from the United States into Mexico and back. Río Bravo is the Mexican term for the Rio Grande, the river that marks the border.
Minerva Cuevas, Crossing the Rio Bravo, 2010. Photograph from the artist's action. Courtesy of Minerva Cuevas and kurimanzutto Mexico City / New York
Cuevas had brought something into the gallery that I did not think was possible to translocate. Her installation came with historical documents and other ephemera: antique maps; a thick glass jug filled with water from the river; stones from the bank; a compass; wildflowers preserved under glass hemispheres; and a bucket of the white paint that she used for her line. As I walked through the exhibit, I thought of a Salvadoran father named Óscar Martínez and his daughter, Valeria, who earlier that year had drowned in the Río Bravo, arm in arm, as they sought refuge in the United States. And yet coexisting with the awful immensity of the border—with its hundred-and-seventy-five-year history of violence and bloodshed—was an undeniable, inexorable beauty.
And last, I found this extraordinary painting on somebody’s Facebook page with no attribution (a big no-no, people), and just as I was about to ask the World Wide Web if anyone knew who painted it, I noticed the faint letters along the left side of the painting.
Alex Alemany. He’s a Spanish hyperrealist painter who should be world-famous—and maybe he is. Maybe you know all about him, and here I am with egg on my face, introducing you to someone you already know and could tell me a thing or two about him. But look at that painting. It’s the artist painting the artist painting the artist.
But there’s more…
I found this one by him, too:
Check out this link and prepare to be mesmerized. I didn’t even try to figure out the meaning of his paintings. It doesn’t matter. They spoke to me loud and clear. I hope they do the same for you.
Until next Friday, then. Take care and stay close. You never know what you’re going to find here.
