My morning coffee brightens the day.
The brew is flavorful, and the hint of chocolate on the back of my tongue is a calming sensory experience for the many thoughts and feelings I have in this stream of consciousness.
After months of procrastination, I’m gaining clarity about this post. I’m not writing about food this time, although I’m sure that a large bag of chips will make its way to me as I write about kindness and ─ oddly enough ─ empaths, people who have a high sensitivity to stimuli, including other people’s emotions. I’m writing about being empathic ─ not empathetic.
While researching, I came across a definition about the difference between empathic and empathetic. In an article published by Stylist, an online magazine based in the UK, Lucy Fry writes the following:
Being an empath is developmental, whereas empathy can be learned.
Fry continues: Empaths easily lose themselves in feelings. For most people expressing empathy means making a concerted effort to see the world through someone else’s lens in a kind way. For an empath, however, it can get confusing. These types of people absorb others’ emotions so quickly and easily they’re sometimes unsure which lens is whose. The boundaries between the self and others can be thin, which means they are super sensitive to other people’s needs but can also entirely lose track of their own.
This is why it’s so important for empaths to learn how to take care of themselves (and their gift), so they can find ways to protect themselves from drowning in feelings that don’t belong to them. https://www.stylist.co.uk/health/mental-health/empath-empathic-person/641521
You’re too sensitive, Sala. Sigh. I’ve been told this numerous times.
You want to hear the heart in the voice. Alexa’s words landed like sparks in a dry field.
Yes.
Not too long ago, I was irritated by a conversation I was having. I felt that the person wouldn’t shut up until she had me submerged in the cesspool of anger she swims in all the time. All. The. Time.
I’m a human sponge. I soak up other people’s emotions like others suck up soda through a straw. When I’ve gone to the movies, I’ve found that I feel almost physically pulled into any violent action on the screen. I feel overwhelmed. So, I don’t go to the movies. I don’t read violent novels. I have an enduring crush on Stephen King and have slept with his book On Writing next to my pillow. But I have never seen, nor will I, a movie adaptation of his books. I was traumatized as a child by Hitchcock’s Psycho. I’ve never seen a Tarantino film, and I did not watch Game of Thrones ─ my sister advised me against it. Give me the Hallmark Channel, Notting Hill and Madea.
Don’t. Judge. Me.
According to Dr. Judith Orloff, a board certified psychiatrist and expert on the subject of Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs): Empaths absorb other people’s emotions.
There it was: absorb. While others define themselves as extrovert or introvert, I’m defining myself as an empath. The Cleveland Clinic notes that you may also identify with being a highly sensitive person (HSP), a personality trait that was first used by psychologists in the 1990s to describe someone with a deep sensitivity to the physical, emotional, or social situations and information around them. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/highly-sensitive-person/
My parents, Bill and Libby, joined millions of American Blacks who moved to northern and western states during the Great Migration from the South. I will never know the depth of their disenchantment on discovering the same racial discrimination and limited economic opportunities in Washington, D.C. that they had left behind in South Carolina.
Exposed to Mom’s anger and disappointment at having had to leave her beloved career ─ teaching ─ to raise five children in poverty and her mood swings from having to witness my father’s humiliation and rage when private builders told him ─ a master brick mason ─ that “coloreds” weren’t being hired, I absorbed their every emotion. I cried a lot. When teachers sent us home from school the day President Kennedy was assassinated, I threw myself on my bed and sobbed. And despite my empathy for my family and our world, I became unkind and angry.
Mine or Yours?
A White neighbor called to vent about another devastating U.S. Supreme Court decision on Affirmative Action and the efforts to obstruct racial diversity in higher education. They’ve been busy taking rights away these days. She ranted, not taking a breath and not allowing me to speak. I listened. When she was done, she thanked me for allowing her to “get it off my chest.” I responded, “Good. You need to know that I did not take it onto mine.” Her silence was brief but obvious. She had been hoping I would join her anger.
“I lived through those days,” I said. “How can you possibly be angrier than someone who experienced those times?”
I felt the wind go out of her sails. I was honest. I was direct. I felt powerful. It’s not that I don’t get angry. It’s that I have experienced self-protection and learned ways to know if it’s my anger, not someone else’s.
Childhood Educators Are Saints
During my ─ if-only-they-could-be-forgotten ─ adolescent years, the vice principal of our junior high school took me under her wing. A tall woman with dark chocolate skin and closely clipped hair, she was a no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners administrator. She offered a wide, memorable smile that, behind her back, prompted cowardly kids to call her “King Kong.” Fiercely principled, Mrs. G. was a potent advocate for young people. If, however, one was foolish enough to challenge her authority, you did so at your peril. I didn’t know too many kids who were willing to face their parents for being suspended or, even worse, expelled.
My grades were poor. Incidents of colorism – discrimination based on color within the race ─ fed my anger, and I was filled with anxiety about American culture. Additionally, adolescents are markedly known for meanness, and one day I found myself in a fight with a light-skinned girl who looked Caucasian. She was not. A ring of girls surrounded us and chanted “Fight! Fight!” This, not surprisingly, led to a sit-down in the principal’s office. Mrs. G. put her arms around my shoulders. “Walk with me.” We walked the halls. She didn’t use the word “colorism” or demean other students for their behavior. She spoke kindly and told me I was smart, that I could do better. Something inside me softened, if only for a little while.
My Ways of Empathic Protection
Therapy and Psychotherapists
During my twenties, I was led to a compassionate therapist who taught me something: Anger and repressed fear were my defaults. If I couldn’t identify or own my feelings, I could not respond to life circumstances authentically.
Prayer
I found a spiritual path that focused on the love of God ─ not “fear” ─ as the unseen guidance. I could no longer sing “saved a wretch” in the hymn Amazing Grace. I sang “saved a soul.” Chanting became a daily practice, and service ─ volunteering, a lifelong practice for me ─ took on a golden hue. I was becoming softer, more vulnerable. When, after 30 years, I left California for the east coast, a friend told me gently that he had watched me transform over the years. “You’ve lost that explosive anger.” I was moved ─ my own feeling. I remember saying to someone during those years, “I like a lot of soft around me.” In the company of softness, I felt ─ and feel ─ good.
Food
Ahh, yes. I knew I’d come back to the plate. Beginning with family meals for the seven of us in our two-bedroom apartment and extended family gatherings to visits with my grandparents in the south and church picnics, food preparation and pure laughter became a major empathic lifeline. Hugs were plentiful. Empathy was strengthened. I learned that in cooking, sharing, and eating good food, life could be joyful. But it’s been a rocky ride here. Sometimes my empathic protection revealed itself in weight gain. The soft protection of bulge around the belly. Other times, my love of sharing food and company with people I love has been the empathic lifeline.
Nature
I call my apartment a tree house. Outside my windows, the leaves of the trees serve as curtains in the summer. The southwestern sun keeps my apartment warm in the winter. I am heralded with birdsong, and I hope the circling hawks don’t see the rabbits occasionally nibbling by the side of the building.
Okay.
Now that I’ve finished my coffee and reflections for the morning, I’m on my way to juice apples and pears in the safety and comfort of my kitchen, a comforting place where I always experience the “soft around me.”
Till next time.
Pastoral scenery. An all-black campus. These were my desires. I’d spent so much time in rural countryside that I deeply looked forward to the nature of things. I love this country landscape. But this is what I do not understand: with all of my love for the rural, how have I always resided so close to the city? More on that another time, but the fruit of my fertilization by both cultures cannot be underestimated.
Sala
wordshavecolor.com 
Breaking Bread
“Let us break bread together on our knees.” I remember Mom’s soprano filling the apartment with melody.
The lyrics are branded on my heart, and I’m reminded of three principles spawned from eating with family and friends. Gratitude. Service. Healing.
Gratitude for having access to food no matter how humble. Service in preparing food to share with others. The Healing that comes with sharing prayers, laughter, and companionship.
When I allow myself to feel the sadness that can come from eating alone ─ a consequence of the pandemic lockdown and my being medically unvaccinated ─ I recognize that sharing a meal is fundamental to self-nurturing.
I don’t remember the exact holiday. Some 50 years ago, at Passover, Rosh Hashana, or a Friday evening Shabbat, I sat across from my Jewish hosts. I knew nothing about Judaism except for what they explained about Kosher meals. Nineteen years old, Black and, most definitely raised Baptist, I nevertheless felt an intimacy with my new friends. We had mutual history: slavery, oppression, and escape from bondage. I relaxed into the comfort of being welcomed and learning about a new culture. I felt…nurtured and accepted. But I also nurtured and accepted them when I agreed to share a meal ─ “break bread” ─ with people I barely knew.
Recently, I came upon an article in The Atlantic by Amanda Mull entitled “How America Lost Dinner.” (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/10/work-its-whats-for-dinner/599770/ )
Mull outlines the path taken to our fast food, take-out culture and how we’ve become a society where so many of us are accustomed to eating alone. Family dinners, it seems, have been relegated to the back burner of American life. At first, I was reactive, thinking, “Well! That’s not my experience.”
Reaction instead of response is always a misstep.
By the time I finished reading, I was responding to Mull’s analysis that “By all indications, Americans want to cook and eat together.” Agreed. I rarely feel bad when I’m sharing mealtimes with others.
I grew up in a family that bonded when eating together. Maybe it’s because each of us contributed to the preparation of a meal. A task might not be pleasant, but it contributed to the health and joy of the meal. Yes, I said it. Joy. There was nothing like Daddy rolling from his chair onto the floor to exaggeratedly crawl away from the Thanksgiving table because the meal was so good and filling. Of course, once on all fours, he became a horse. There were plenty of siblings and cousins around to take advantage of his back.
My father liked to fish, bringing home perch or shad or whatever unlucky vertebrate took hold of his line that day. Cleaning fish taught me a kind of focus in the kitchen. Mom was always nearby watching. If I grabbed them the wrong way, the scales would prick my fingers.
“No. Do it this way!”
And I would do it as she instructed. When the fish’s body was smooth enough to run my hand along both sides without getting caught on the scales, I was ready for the nasty part ─ gutting. Sometimes, there was roe, a delicacy that, to this day, I will not eat. Call it caviar if you want.
The grossest part was the beheading. Looking into the blank eyes of a lifeless creature was my personal science fiction movie. With vacant eyes staring, it seemed, at me, I looked the other way as I severed the head from the body. And there, my friends, is another delicacy I will not touch ─ fish heads in any dish whatsoever.
We did not fillet our fish. I remember only too vividly my mother reaching into a child’s throat to remove a spiky bone. She may at times have resented motherhood, but she would not let us die.
We blessed the food. We ate the food. The fried fish, accompanied by biscuits, collard greens, mashed potatoes and gravy was well worth the trauma of the cleaning. In those moments of blessing, intimacy filled the space. If Daddy was home, we’d have spirited discussions about what was going on in the world. Assassinations ─ Gandhi. Malcolm X. President Kennedy. Civil Rights. Daddy shared some important wisdom: “Don’t ever judge another man unless you’ve walked in his shoes.” To this day, I hear his voice in my head as I meet all kinds of folk.
The pandemic has caused many of us to reevaluate and reprioritize our values and forced folks to slow down and acknowledge ─ positively or negatively ─ the people and communities surrounding them. For me, ironically, the lockdown highlighted the absence of cooking for folks and sharing a meal. I delighted in self-examination and sharing my time with the food writings of Ruth Teichl, Verta Mae Grosvenor, Edna Lewis and the delightful food adventures of Peter Mayle. I truly loved the stillness and nature’s rejuvenation and protection of the animals. However, there was something missing. I know it takes time to plan, shop, and prepare meals. But there is a huge ripple of love in the heart when serving others ─ that love is serving myself.
I was in a large vegetarian kitchen of an ashram. There were maybe fifteen of us or more. We were engaged in various stages of preparing the meal for a holiday celebration. Some were kneading bread, others chopping fruit and vegetables; a huge caldron of soup was being stirred and tofu “turkey” artistically prepared. The enthusiasm in preparing a meal to serve so many people ─ literally a few hundred ─ filled the room with ─ you got it ─ Joy. It was joy that came with gratitude for the chance to serve and for the personal satisfaction that comes with feeding others. Nurturing for them, nurturing for me.
Shortly after moving to Philadelphia, I lived in a house with a woman who lived in filth. I didn’t know this at first. When I went to check out the house, it was immaculate, but by the third week, the truth had revealed itself with the dog poop in the front yard that was left to dry on flagstone plates. The flies and stench irritated the neighbors who told me that it had been an ongoing problem. The laundry basement reeked of a cat litter box. My housemate was either unwilling or unable to help with kitchen and bathroom duties on a regular basis. I had been duped.
In a phone call with a clergyman, I whined, “Is Philadelphia hell?” He was kind; he chuckled, and gave me practical advice. Meditation, prayer, and finding someplace to volunteer. This made me feel better, and I began volunteering at a grocery coop where my job was ─ wait for it ─ weighing cuts of cheese and slicing bread. I was not homeless. I was not hopeless. My search for a new home began.
I ate in my room with the door closed, and in the days that followed, I consulted a psychic who told me: “Your housemate has unhealed trauma. People who live in filth have unhealed trauma.” I could hear Daddy’s voice again.
“Don’t ever judge another man unless you’ve walked in his shoes.” Lordy. What a mess.
Shortly after that call, I found some compassion, ordered pizza, and we ate together. Tensions began to dissolve, and I found my own apartment.
“Breaking bread opens people up. If you get in the habit of this as a family, you can talk about anything.”
My friend Tina said this to me almost 20 years ago. She and her husband had an ironclad commitment ─ which they keep to this day ─ to family dinners. At that time, they had eaten with the children every single day for 15 years. And I want to say that her children have become the most grounded, healthy, loving adults I know. Healthy traditions give birth to healthy families. Healthy families spawn unity. Unity is what we need in these miraculous, challenging, and eventful times.
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Posted in Commentary, Essay, Family memories, Food, Gratitude, Heart and Mind, Memoir, Reflection, service, Stories about life, Values
Tagged essay, Family memories, food, Gratitude, memoir, Reflections, service, Stories about life, values and spirituality