An Empath in a Narcissists’ World

A few years ago, I finally figured out I’m an empath, and basically that’s why I’m an asshole magnet. Among other things, I attract frenemies more often than genuine friends. Empathy-challenged people think they can walk all over me, manipulate me, and shower me with verbal and psychological abuse with no consequences. They think they’re somehow magically entitled to treat me like shit. With many, it doesn’t matter if I call them out: they’ll keep doing it until I go No Contact.

There was a time when I endured such treatment without question, even though my emotional reactions were clearly telling me these people needed to fuck off. As a child and teen, I assumed I was essentially unacceptable and unlikeable, and this was the sort of behavior I could expect from humans. Oddly I didn’t remind myself that I didn’t treat people that way.

By age seventeen, I’d been a social pariah and the main school scapegoat all through school, and misogynistic boys bullied me before I entered the anti-empath school system that labeled me “Special Ed” merely because I was an empath with social anxiety who was selectively mute. I don’t remember how the conversation with my narcissist mother began, but my mother said something, and I said, “Humans are nasty!”

My mother acted shocked. She turned to my brother and said, “She’s a cynic! A seventeen-year-old…