When I was in first grade, Mrs. Kauble told us to draw a map of our neighborhood. Jimmy Christian, who lived in a trailer park a few roads over from my house and rode the same bus as me, wasn’t happy about this. He had to draw at least forty little rectangles plus all the sidewalks and paths and driveways and roads that connected them.
“It’s not fair,” Jimmy said.
To which Mrs. Kauble responded: “The world is unfair, Jimmy.”
I felt for him. I felt for him because I was the kind of child who spent a lot of time taking on the burdensome feelings of others as though they were my own. I was a fraternal twin. My brain had developed under what I have come to call the same-same principle. Freud probably has a name for it too. Maybe something like Triple Backwards Projection Transference Disorder. My sister-in-law once called it my equality narrative, and I’m pretty sure she did not mean that in a nice way.
This meant that if my brother Zach didn’t want to go feed the neighbor’s rabbits with me because the last time we fed them we discovered all the babies had been eaten by their mother, I walked down the road alone carrying his dread. Initially, I had felt only a wild curiosity about the latest litter of bunnies. I hoped they were still alive, of course, but I did not dread the discovery. Until I did—because my brother felt it and, I decided, so should I.
These feelings also had a way of sneaking up on me with other people. So when Jimmy felt indignant, I did too, especially since I was guilty of having a neighborhood map much simpler than his. This really brings to light the inauthenticity of my same-same emotional tendencies, which, I am now convinced, have less to do with true empathy and more to do with a kind of self-preserving denial of difference. Taking on the burdensome feelings of others meant that I could trick myself into thinking I was the same as any other person—or, for that matter, any other animal or reptile or bird I encountered. I could then avoid the inevitably lonesome fact that Jimmy and I were not the same. Or, even worse, that I someday might feel something that my twin brother would not also feel, and thus be left to grapple with my unique emotional conundrums all alone.
Menu