Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em

Amelie reminded me of something with a recent post.

Sometimes, I get a feeling which is similar to having vertigo. It feels like I’m looking down at everything but it doesn’t make me dizzy. Can’t tell you why I get this feeling but sometimes it happens. Through trial and error, I’ve learned to trust that feeling more often than not, since it usually happens right before some event. While I wouldn’t go as far as calling is a psychic ability, it definitely manifests itself as a super-sensitivity to the emotions of those around me…

Weird as it is, this story is true…  When I was about 10, I woke up with this same feeling. Rather than disperse like a fog, the feeling coalesced as the day progressed. I didn’t even want to leave the house, staying in my room all morning and through the early afternoon. That day, going outside wasn’t an option I wanted to explore… until around 3 o’clock when my primary care giver decided she wanted to go out shopping. Then she asked me to go get my older brother who was playing up at the local park. She wanted to go shopping with our neighbor across the street and when she grabbed my younger brother I freaked out. I told her not to cross the street because something bad was gonna happen. She got mad at me for trying to scare her. In my house, when you did something like that, you got five across the jawline. She slapped me and told me to go get my older brother. I begged, pleaded and cried but she wouldn’t listen to me… Just kept slapping me up the hill. I turned around frightened out of my head, crying and had only taken a few steps up the hill when I heard the unmistakeable crack of Detroit steel meeting my younger brother. I didn’t see the car hit him but I did manage to see him land some 25 yards away, rolling and sliding on the asphalt like a plastic doll. Those three or four minutes have stayed with me and even now, almost 30 years later, I still shudder as that scene plays out in my mind’s eye.

After my brother was hit by a car, my aunt, a psychotherapist, convinced my parents that I should go to therapy to make sure I wasn’t traumatized. The psychologist interviewed my mother first and she told the doctor that I “knew what was gonna happen,” before it happened so I must have caused it. The psychologist asked me about it and did a few association tests. Afterwards, she summed it up by calling me “highly empathic.” She said that some people can tune into peoples emotions and energy, both good and bad. Her thought was that sometimes the body warns people about danger, a leftover from before our evolutionary climb to the top of the food chain. The same instinctual brainwaves that dogs sometimes use to know if a person is “wrong” was the way she explained to me.

I’ve had it happen time and time again in varying degrees of intensity. Sometimes I get that feeling and something trivial will happen, other times it is something serious. Either way it might just be coincidence.

I had that feeling once with my ex-girlfriend Sarah. On this occasion it happened on an afternoon spent together at an aquarium. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the weather but I just got this really bad feeling right smack in the middle of a great day together. I didn’t say anything to Sarah about what I was feeling because I didn’t think it was worth worrying her about it. That night, Sarah went out on a date with some random guy she had met a few days before. While she was out on her date, the feeling was strong, almost incapacitating.

When she got home, I told her I had an odd feeling about her and asked her if she had anything to tell me. Her response was an incredulous, “Who told you?”

It’s not a psychic or supernatural ability in the slightest. It’s just an acute emotional perception. People feel things around me and I can feel it too. Sarah was feeling restless and was daydreaming about what it would be like to be with someone else. I picked up on something that simple. Sometimes it happens with simple emotions the people I care about are having too…

If someone is really mad, I feel their anger but might not know why. If they’re sad or depressed, I get really blue without there being a reason. Sometimes I’m feeling these emotions and pass them on to others subconsciously. IT SUCKS! It is one of the reasons why I am the way I am… Emotions are not my friends by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s not a good feeling and it makes me jumpy. I have an overactive imagination and that might be some of it but I don’t think its all of it. Someone, somewhere in my daily conversations or contacts sends a vibe and I catch it. I don’t know who it is or what this is about because it could be anyone I’ve been in contact with or spoken to over the phone. I hate this feeling and would give anything to not feel this way ever again. Sometimes it’s better not to know.