Ever since I can't remember, I have always been described as a selfish and cold person. I do not find this to be true. I feel a lot of things, but only regarding myself. When it comes to anyone else, I simply cannot bring myself to feel anything. I have normal connections, ranging from friends and family to enemies and rivals. I can love and hate them but I can't empathize with them. 

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My life is led by the principle of sensations. If someone else is stabbed, I won't feel anything. If I am stabbed, it will hurt. I comprehend others have feelings and a unique perspective of life that is inherent to their existence but I don't understand how it can possibly affect me. Even with people I love, I can't put myself in their shoes, no matter how hard at try.

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I can't understand empathy. It seems like a made-up concept. Is it a feeling? I believe it's something invented to make people feel better about themselves. How does it work? Why one's happiness makes you happy? 

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I can understand it's the right thing to feel. It's polite. Saying you recognize the pain in someone else's eyes and feeling bad about it is very cute but very artificial to me. It isn't like a don't care about others, I just have a shell of indifference around me that blocks any chance of really seeing other people as complex beings and not as an extension of myself that only exists when I want to pay attention to it. 

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I care about others in a social sense. I am enamoured with politics and social movements but those things can't affect me if someone is telling me that personally. For instance, I am part of the LGBTQ+ community. I loathe every form of prejudice that comes with being part of it. I know how to tell apart right from wrong. If one of my friends talks about suffering from homophobic acts, I will put on an act and say those things are awful when, in reality, I just can't feel anything. It shouldn't have happened but why would I feel anything about it? 

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I am not worried about being perceived as a bad person. I can regret some of my actions but I just can't feel any sort of guilt. To me, guilt is an appendix of empathy. Regret, at least for me, is a sort of disappointment tangled with financial or time-related consequences. 

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After years of being diagnosed with BPD, I find myself questioning it since so many people describe us as highly empathetic people. I have heard of periods of apathy but never of a lifetime without feeling anything for others.

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I'm exhausted. I don't enjoy faking feelings. It's uncomfortable to spend my days faking it since people get offended by my not having a reaction. I don't care for what they think but maintaining a well-planned facade helps. Those who claim to be empathetic sure can't be empathetic with someone who doesn't feel like them. 

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I sometimes think people can't really feel it. I am a hedonist and my curiosity lies in the unknown. I wouldn't like to feel empathy every day but perhaps once or twice just to know what it feels like. The concept of feeling for others just seems unbearable to me, I have enough feelings for a single person.

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The closest thing I have ever felt to empathy is artistic identification. Sometimes, when a piece of art is stained by the artist's soul, I identify with it. I feel seen and validated by it and sometimes I create a parasocial relationship with the artist but that doesn't happen in real life.

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In general, my aversion and curiosity towards empathy can be explained. And while I find the concept of it stupid, I would like to know what it feels like, at least once.