I think everyone has moments of extreme clarity. You could be walking down the street and realize, albeit to late, that you just hurt someone’s feelings and the relationship will never recover. Or you can be in a meeting with your boss and your bosses’ boss and offer a clever answer that not only makes you look bad, but makes your boss look like a complete tool for hiring you. Clarity after something like that is good, but remorse is ill spent.
I’ve had an unknown number of such moments and for the most part, I tend to accept the consequences without complaint. I know what I am and I know what my words have done to people. My problem isn’t with keeping my mouth shut, although some might suspect that is the source of a majority of the problems I have with people.
I chalk it, my problems with people, up to a complete lack of emotions. Or maybe its is better explained as a lack of peaks and valleys on the emotional scale of human interaction. I don’t often feel angry, hurt, sad, lonely, confused, happy, joyous, bitter, solemn, or overwhelmed. Most of the time I just feel empty… a void that accepts readily whatever is willing to take up space.
Emotions, for the most part, are a complete waste of energy for me. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a meltdown of any kind and hope I never do. It might also be said that I don’t readily accept being mistreated when someone has a meltdown. I’ve been on the receiving end of those emotional outbursts and have really said and done some truly horrific things in response. I’m not writing that with pride or remorse, just making sure it all gets down so there isn’t ever any misunderstanding.
I can’t fake empathy or compassion for my fellow man. It comes across as insincere and lets face it, when it comes to those two things, it is. Really empathy and compassion arise not out of remorse for what has been said and done TO another, but out of fear that they will lose something for it. Is that sincerity? If this is true, and I believe it is, then apologies are really the ultimate form of selfishness because they are only beneficial to the apologist since the damage has already been done.
I think I’d rather say and do whatever it is I feel like saying and doing. It might cause problems for me and others, but at least there is an honesty not often displayed in human interaction. I won’t lie to make you feel good, but I won’t tell you the truth to hurt you. There is a balance in all things and I try to walk along the edge of the precipice that borders ego. A fragile country to be sure, but one that I have a long history of exploring.