Empathy ⌯ Stiles Stilinski

[00] prologue

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𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄

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EVERYONE struggles, it's a universal phenomena that no one can escape, and plenty have tried. Whether you've broken down in the middle of nowhere because you forgot to get gas on the way up or you have homework due in in less than a week but have absolutely no idea how to do it, everyone struggles.

Being able to manage the struggle is where it becomes difficult. Some let it consume them, others push it to the side, and others face it head on. There are consequences, both good and bad for each one. You let it consume you, then you can probably learn how to cope better, but you end up damaging yourself. You push it to the side, you're no longer stressed, but you never learn how to cope with your issues. And if you face it head on, you can get rid of the problem quickly, but sometimes people don't know how to deal with it, leaving them to then suffer from option number one.

There's an issue that builds along with this, along with suffering. Anxiety.

Some people are no stranger to it, they're no stranger to the way their heart beats painfully fast, giving them the sensation that it's about to rip from its strings, or the way their hands shake and twitch whenever presented with confrontation. Some people hide away from the world, unwilling to confront their issues because of their fear.

The problem stems from the fact that emotions aren't easy. They're difficult to understand, sometimes requiring interpretation. Everyone feels in different ways, something that makes one person happy could make another person's blood boil. The way we feel builds things inside us, inside our minds.

Each person holds an entire universe full of life inside them, all because of the things they feel. It's something that humans have tried to study for millennia because of the worlds we can build inside us.

A whole world that can be built on anger, or happiness, or sadness. Even the worlds outside our minds, built based on the things we feels, the decisions we make. This world, our world, is built on everything and anything, every speck of euphoria, sadness, trepidation, any emotion you can think of, this world is built on it.

And inside this world are people, people who house an organ of unimaginable power. Our minds work in unimaginable ways, helping keep us alive, helping us see and breathe, giving us our own thoughts and even letting us know what other people are thinking just by the way their lips have tugged down in a frown. It makes us experience life in such a fantastical and yet bizarre way.

We live in a world of wonder.

And while it started off as happy, problems arose after time. We developed a society that requires the best of people and sometimes the best isn't always possible or people work themselves too hard to reach their best and their minds can't take it.

Our brains get sick, just like us only not with the common cold. They get sick enough that our entire body, our emotions are thrown out of balance and we begin believing that reaching our best is impossible when maybe all we have left is one more step. It contorts our perception on life, making us paranoid, that the one word we said was said in the wrong tone and now they've completely misinterpreted what we've said.

It's difficult, especially when, sometimes, our brains get sick too soon. When we haven't even began to live life before the hopelessness begins to crush us, begins to cave in on us. The hopelessness becomes a black hole and we are the harmless matter floating too close to it.

But there's hope, hope that things can get better. To quote a very old wizard, happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if only one remembers to turn on the light.

So if you can ignore the way your heart beats a little faster when your name is called out in class, or the way your brain is sent into overdrive when someone says something you hadn't planned on them saying, you can care.

You can care because you see and because you know. You know how it feels to be so alone in a crowd of people, how it feels when you get the sensation of the world getting smaller and smaller until the walls are so close to you that it just finally crushes you.

And it gets easier when you know someone else feels the same, doesn't it?

It makes you finally realise you're not crazy, that whatever you're feeling is just. . . normal. But how does one go about defining what normal is? Every single person is built from the same thing and yet every single person is completely different. How can you define normal when everyone has their own version of it? How can you make one word define seven billion people?

Seven billion different minds.

And each of us is only one.

One mind with the potential of many. One mind that tends to overthink from time to time, realise that sometimes things aren't as easy as people make them out to be, and so we tend to believe that everything is impossible. At least, most things.

We're told our whole life do this and do that, to act like an adult and then we're asked where our childhood has gone, to grow up and then to just live life how we want. The contradictions that society give are extreme, maybe not in all cases but enough.

It's gotten bad enough that with all the contradictions running around our brains we feel like we can't trust ourselves. Then we go to other people, trying to find whatever was taken from us, whatever we lost and we tend to put our faith in people even when they hurt us. We place our happiness in them expecting them to mould it into something better, into something that will make us finally understand why we're here, why we should stay here.

But our faith, our happiness shouldn't be placed in other people, it should be placed in ourselves. We need to learn to love ourselves, to know that the world isn't closing in on us, to know that the sky will remain up there and it won't fall down here.

We shouldn't try and find happiness in other people, maybe sometimes we just need them to bring it out in us.

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( word count: 1.1k )

*pops her head out from behind the corner* hi. so. i decided to rewrite empathy, for the second time. but i didn't regret it the first time and i haven't regretted it this time. . . yet. i decided to keep the prologue the same, save for a few extra words and clarity. i spent so long trying to write it out the first time that i knew i would probably want to throw myself off a cliff if i tried again. it was a bitch to write once. if it's not broken, don't fix it.