on being a fucking adult.

for me personally, prose is the thing i was born to. prose is the thing i could do drunk off my ass in the middle of the night. prose is the thing i could never seem to fuck up as completely as everything else in my life. 

but it's easy to drink all day, typing silly little poems about nothing particularly important. it's easy to ramble on about ambiguous metaphors or imagined slights. so i guess i thought i'd try writing something a little more down to earth. something a little less trite. something a little more sober. maybe it'll suck. maybe it won't.

you hear that expression everywhere: "walk a mile in some else's shoes"; you've probably even repeated it one or two times yourself. but that idiom pisses me off. i believe the author of this statement itself meant well, yet missed the entire point: do you really need to go through the same experiences as someone else before you are able to empathize with them?

of course not.

there's no possible way that you'll ever go through all, or even a significant portion, of the experiences of just one of the myriad people you'll meet over the course of your life. there's no way you'll be able to walk even a few feet in another person's shoes, let alone an entire mile. so what am i getting at here; am i saying empathy is pointless?

of course not.

empathy is by far the trait i consider the most important in regard to other people. shit; it's by far the trait that i consider the most important in regard to myself.

i find the thought that you need to share someone's experiences before you can understand someone's feelings completely maddening. i find the assumption that you need to feel what someone feels before you can empathize with what they feel absolutely absurd. yes, i agree it never hurts to know what it feels like to be in someone else's shoes, but knowing how someone else is feeling should never, ever be a prerequisite for taking it upon yourself to understand how someone else is feeling.

ever.