This Bridge Called My Empathy
Welcome to our season of love as accountability.
I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your human-ness
I'm sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long
I'm sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf of your better selves
- Kate RushinMy empathy is a spiritual gift. It’s clairempathy, a mode of extra sensory perception. I used to say what I heard others say, frame my experience the way that I heard others frame theirs. “I can imagine what they must be feeling,” I’d say. That was me minimizing what I now know as true. I was never imagining the feelings of others. I was actually feeling the emotions, experiencing in my body a shared awareness of the emotional energy, moods, and traumas of another.
For most of my life, the fact that I could feel into the core wounds that influenced another person's behavior caused me to make excuses for them. To give that person grace and space and cover for their actions, because I felt their pain. I now know that just because I can feel the wounds at the root of someone’s behavior, it doesn't mean that I have to offer them shield. It doesn't mean I have to allow this emotive telepathy to be what determines how I relate to their choices.
I can and will feel into other people's pain, understand the motivations underneath their actions, know precisely how their behavior is rooted in traumas that are no fault of their own. And I can also hold people accountable for their behavior. I can choose to no longer be in someone’s life if their behavior is not aligned with who and how I want to be in the world, with the experiences that I choose to have in relationships.
It sounds simple enough. But it’s taken me this long to get here.
I haven’t always understood my ability to empathize with people who cause harm. Sometimes my confusion has led me to wonder if I’m the monster. If I can feel what someone who has done monstrous things is feeling, can hold empathy for them regardless, what does this mean about me? Does my ability to empathize with a bad person mark me as similarly bad?
I understand now that this capacity is a marker of my initiation by Spirit into integration. Into releasing the false construct of good and bad people altogether. Into recognition of the capacity that we all hold to both harm and be harmed.
Connected to this experience of integration, for me, is unconditional love. Loving people is, for me, not dependent on their actions. I think this is in part because I’ve loved people in my own life who have done objectively terrible things, to me and to others. We are often told that unconditional love means, “I keep you in my life no matter what, I make excuses for your behavior no matter what, I allow you to keep harming me in the same way no matter what.” I used to believe this, too. Unconditionally loving action, I now understand, doesn't mean choosing to hold unconditional space for people. A loving action can sometimes, must sometimes, mean holding a boundary that calls someone to have to face themselves.
Sometimes my absence is the most loving thing that I can offer someone. But love is still at the root of that choice. Love is still the choice itself. It’s a choice to hold a person as a human being who was born into, formed and shaped by, wounds and traumas and environments that were none of their fault or responsibility. I can’t help but choose that when I can’t help but feel their pain, feel into the reactions and responses they developed in order to do what they believed was their job under capitalism – suck it up, shove it down, numb it, project it onto others, hurt or be hurt.
But I can simultaneously hold them as a human being who is accountable to others, who will and necessarily must face consequences for their perpetuation of further harm. I recognize the perpetuation of further harm as being rooted in the inability and/or unwillingness to face one's core wounds, to feel and heal that pain. Unconditional love means wanting people to heal, supporting them to be whole human beings - both so that they will stop harming others, and so that they can feel and heal their own pain. So that they can come back into the fold of remembering their own humanity.
Sometimes love comes in the form of consequences that force someone to face themselves in ways that they would not otherwise. Whether or not they choose to engage in that process is not my responsibility. It is my responsibility, as love, to not shield them from the opportunity.
People who have caused great harm must necessarily face great consequences. Sometimes those consequences are very visible to us, externalized for all to see. The fall from grace, the guilty verdict in a judicial court, the stripping away of power and resources. Sometimes they're not visible. We have witnessed those who cause great harm retain all of their worldly trappings and protections. What we couldn’t see was the extent to which they experienced internal suffering the likes of which most of us will never face.
2025 is a year of great consequence. Internal ones, yes. But we are also going to see people face public consequences to a greater degree than we ever have in our lifetime.
You and I are not separate from this process. In the places where we have caused harm, in the unmet parts of ourselves at the foundation of that harm, we will be given the opportunity to choose who we become in the light of the truth of who we have been.
Consequences are not the same thing as punishment. Too many of us confuse the two. I’m not interested in retribution or revenge, in inflicting further pain on those who have hurt me. I don’t actually believe that I have the right to perpetuate harm because I’ve experienced it. Punishment does nothing to complete the cycle and shift the dynamic in the direction of what we desire. But consequences can catalyze this shift, if the offender has the will and the support to allow the results of their actions to be an invitation to face and change themselves.
A lot of people who are in very visible positions of power in the false reality that is crumbling and disintegrating in front of our eyes are going to face real, material consequences for their harmful behavior in this time, the likes of which they have never faced before. We’re already witnessing this, and it’s only going to intensify.
Experiencing empathy for those we rightfully identify as having caused great harm doesn't mean that we are complicit in that harm. It doesn't mean that we're condoning their behavior. But that empathy also can’t be the reason why we decide to shield those people from the consequences of their actions. It’s in the consequences that they’re given the opportunity to choose to come back to humanity, to come back to love. They won't otherwise. And we can't force them to.
But what I fear is the potential for us to to lose our humanity when we decide that these are bad, evil people, and we therefore have the right to harm them the way that they've harmed us. The potential for us to fall prey to the lie that harming them the way that they have harmed us is the solution to our problems. I don't believe that's actually ever been the solution to any of our problems. A dehumanizing structure dehumanizes us all.
I think that the strongest choice we can make - those of us who actually want to create a new world - is to do everything that we can to maintain our empathy. And this empathy calls us to hold all of it, to hold the truth in totality. Expanding our definition of humanity is what leads us to a new world. We must expand our capacity for empathy, rather than a narrowing it into an us versus them dynamic. That construct of us versus them is what the ruling class has done to us, what they’ve used against us. But turning the frame upside down will not fundamentally change the picture.
We’ve been socialized under a false paradigm of good guys and bad guys. We’ve been told that empathy is something we’re meant to reserve for the good and deny from the bad. This is why we have prisons. This is why, in 2024, voters in my home state rejected a proposition that would have made forced labor illegal in state prisons. Those are bad guys, so who cares if bad things happen to them, right? If we really are abolitionists, we can’t cage empathy as something that’s only available to those we deem deserving, those we believe are on our side.
I recognize that people who’ve caused harm and are uninterested in holding themselves accountable are receiving consequences en masse in 2025 and beyond. That is simply the energetic season we’re in. The people who fucked around will find out. I don't root for or celebrate their downfall. I don't wish for them to feel the pain that they've inflicted on others. I wish for them the consequences of their actions, as enacted by the order and timing of the universe, because I ultimately wish for the opportunity for them to choose to return to their humanity. To be a part of us returning to our collective humanity. The choice is theirs.
I, too, have fucked around and found out. But for my hyper-empathetic self, it has looked like allowing my empathy to lead me to excuse and enable harmful behavior. It has ended with me shattered, devastated, disconnected from my own humanity in ways that led me to the brink of self-destruction.
What I’ve learned out of these consequences is not to feel less empathy, not to be less loving. I have, instead, learned to be much more discerning about how I choose to work with these gifts. To be much more discerning about when my empathy leads me to make the loving choice of inviting someone back into my life through repair, and when my empathy leads me to make the loving choice of sending someone on their way.
The determining factor that I use to make this choice is no longer words. It is now how my body feels in response to behavior. I'm discerning based on the energy of their actions. My body knows how great the distance is between the potential of the connection of our highest, most loving selves, and the experience of a relationship on the physical plane. My body is going to tell me if I don’t fell safe, if my needs are not being met, if I am in danger. Will I act on what it tells me?
This is a lesson that goes all the way back to my core wound. When I was a child, and my body told me, we're in danger, we're in danger, we're in danger. I wasn’t safe then to say, I will sever this relationship if this behavior doesn't stop, and I don’t care how much I love you because I need my own love the most.
I’m an adult now, and it’s my responsibility to do this. I’ve learned the hard way that I must evaluate who can and cannot be a physical presence in my life based not on the energy of how our higher selves connect, but on whether or not their behavior aligns with that energy. If it's not aligned, my body will tell me. And the degree to which my body experiences distress maps onto that distance between action and intention.
I used to think that, when I felt the energetic distance between the words of love someone spoke to me and the actions they took toward me, it was my job to offer them more grace, more chances. To extend myself more. To bend an additional inch over backwards. To bend deeply enough that they could, essentially, walk all over me. I did this from an intention of wanting to be loving, wanting to do anything and everything in and beyond my capacity to support people in meeting me in the place of pure love that I knew was possible. I wanted them to be able to feel in reality what I felt in the potential of our connection. To experience that in their body, even if it meant walking on mine. I believed that that was what I was here to do. On a subconscious level, the belief that I carried from childhood was that it was fine for me to sacrifice my own body if it meant that the steps someone took on my back brought them closer to becoming the person I knew they had the potential to be. Not only was it fine, it was a good and loving act, so I thought.
It’s like Fiona sings in “Slow Like Honey.”
When fantasy and reality lie too far apart
So I stretch myself across like a bridge
And I pull you to the edge
I stretched and pulled and fucked around. And I found out that this kind of un-boundaried empathy only leaves me with a fucked up spine.
Is it any coincidence that I’m currently seeking physical therapy for the pain that my actual spine is in?
When I first saw the cover of the 1981 anthology of radical writing by women of color entitled This Bridge Called My Back, when I first read Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem” that opens the volume, I felt an immediate sense of recognition. I have, like so many women of color, spent my life “seeing and touching both sides of things,” living an existence in which I thought “being the damn bridge for everybody” was my role. No more.
How does your body respond to the distance between the words and the actions of those who claim to have our collective best interests at heart?
Now, when I recognize a discrepancy between who someone says they want to be and how they actually show up, the energetic distance between their words and their behavior, I get to offer them one good time to come at me in this way. I get to take responsibility for saying what I need to say about their behavior, and deciding whether or not I choose to offer them the opportunity to show me something different. If they do not, cannot, show me something different, I must - regardless of what truth of their core wounds I feel at the root of their behavior – love them and me by holding a boundary, so that they have the opportunity to face themselves as a result of that consequence.
What boundaries must we hold together?
Because breaking our own backs is not actually loving, toward those who harm us or toward ourselves.
No one is out here hurting people willy nilly unless they themselves are also deeply hurting inside. I know that to be true about human behavior.
But this is a moment where all of us are being called to face ourselves. To face and feel and heal and transmute our wounds, so that we will stop collectively taking them out on each other and the planet. Finally. Once and for fucking all.
I used to bear the brunt of this work for others, feeling everyone else's unfelt pain. I used to not be discerning enough to even be able to differentiate between what of the pain I felt was mine, and what of it was someone else’s. I often couldn’t tell if what I was feeling was me, you, or the environment around us. Nine times out of ten, it was all three.
As painful as it was, spending much of 2024 alone was a gift. It was only through this level of isolation that I was able to feel me. Just me. Solely my energy. I know what I feel like now. And when I step out into the world to interact with other people, I can actually notice the membranes separating me from them, from it all, in a way that I couldn’t before.
Pain and isolation were my consequences. And I’m grateful for them.
This is how, in the midst of the very real chaos and destruction that is happening at this moment, I have never felt, internally, so fucking free. And the experience of this freedom is how I know that our collective freedom is real. It’s how I know that it's not only possible, it's happening. Now. We're collectively getting free. I know this because, on a soul level, I’m not separate from you. And you, on a soul level, are not separate from me.
Wild how I had to learn how to better differentiate my body from yours, so that I could better embody the truth of our soul level Oneness. So that I could better embody the empathy and unconditional love at the core of that Oneness. So that I could learn that a core component of this Oneness is to not shield people from finding out after they have fucked around with my wondrous, precious, gem of a heart. With our wondrous, precious gem of an Earth.
The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate my own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses
I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful
-Kate Rushin
"A loving action can sometimes, must sometimes, mean holding a boundary that calls someone to have to face themselves."
What a great way to describe love in action.
LOVEYOU
Beautiful. As someone with deep empathy, even for those who have harmed me, I deeply resonate. Sending much love your way! <3