lulz.

Why are all human relationships so hard. Why must they be so incredibly painful.
I don't word this as a question but rather as a statement because I know that there is no answer. 
There is no cure to the sickness of difficulty that seeps into relationships sooner or later. We wonder why we let ourselves get so affected. We wonder what is it that makes us so vulnerable, so weak, so miserable.
Whether it's your mother, your sister, your best friend or your lover-- all kinds of relationships are hard.
But the hardest? Opening up to a stranger. 
There is a certain joy in baring one's soul to a single other person. Baring your soul and then baring your body. Being naked, both spiritually and physically, is the most uncomfortable we have been raised to be. Because naked means that you are another insignificant human being with the million flaws that a well fitted black polo shirt or an Instagram filter cannot hide. The fact remains, consistently trying to be perfect, consistently trying to be the best possible version of yourself is extremely exhausting. All of us are self-employed in acting jobs. We act out different roles in our lives in different situations and then recuperate-- thinking without fail the seemingly innocuous question; Who the fuck am I?
And then when we meet that one person we want to be naked with and we say to ourselves, this is it, let me map onto this person, the one form of myself that I like best, the form that he/she likes best too incidentally. And then it happens. We get naked and we dive foolishly and completely into each other discovering facets about each other than resonate and get giddy over small things like Oh, you like blue colored toothbrushes? Me too. Out of the 8 billion people in the world, you like blue toothbrushes-- I am so lucky I met you.
The problem is. That one person can never satisfy you. Those different roles that you play during the day are parts of you that you cannot do away with. Those parts of you catch up and you realize that it is impossible for someone to understand you because you, yourself don't understand what it is you actually are.
Human beings are wonderful, weird creatures that are responsible for both the good things that  happen to them and the bad things. We create our own troubles and weep till dawn and then we create our own happiness and dance to rhythums that we have created. We manufacture love and feed it to ourselves greedily-- it can never be enough to wholly satisfy us.
Find that one person you want to be with. Forget what you want and spend your time trying to understand the other. It is easier to focus on someone else than unravel the turmoil inside because there is no end to it.

Empathy?

A set of questions to decipher how you feel about empathy. Empathy. Em. Pa. Th. E. Reminds you of pathetic. A set of questions asking you what empathy is. Can you empathize? Shudder. Put pen down to paper. Try to empathize.

When and why does your empathy fail?

Remember the time when you were taken to the children’s orphanage? The message above the front door clearly said ‘Time not Money’. Time. Maybe that’s what is needed for empathy.

You remember tried so hard. You sat with the children, tried to leave out the everyday snippets of English that slip into your conversations and talk only in Urdu. You wore your oldest clothes and you deliberately left your cellphone in the car. Because you knew families and even living mothers had abandoned most of them deliberately, you tried to avoid every topic that could somehow be related to talk of family. You thought you were being empathetic. It was hard. By the time you left, you slipped a considerable amount of donation at the head office—you felt undeservingly privileged and terribly, terribly sorry for the children.

The trick is the difference between empathy and sympathy. It is so easy to slip between the two. Empathy is understanding. Empathy is sidelining your emotions to allow for someone else’s feelings to consume you. Empathy is selfless. Empathy is beyond pity. You realize what you felt there was sympathy. Sympathy is giving into pity—that helpless feeling of not being able to do anything Give into sympathy and empathy fails.

Empathy can be challenging and to some extent unachievable. How is that you can empathize with those orphans or lets say a starving child in Africa, when you have no understanding of his situation save that of what the New Yorker tells you? That is not empathy—that is more believing what you are told. That is mass media ladling out excessive shots of empathy, feeding them to the masses until they sicken of the taste.

Sometimes you shut yourself to empathy completely. The day you heard that a 150 children had been shot in Peshawar, in their school, cowering under their desks as bearded, masked men set fire randomly at will, your thoughts immediately went to the mothers. Those mothers who unknowingly sent their children off to school that morning, expecting to see them that very afternoon. You thought of them; crumbling to their feet at the news, helpless and wounded beyond repair. You remember your eyes welled up and your shoulders shook. Just for five minutes. Then, your mind went blank and you pushed away thoughts of pain to the back of your head. Some things are so terrible, so brutal; you can’t bring yourself to terms with the thought of them. The limitations of human capacity to feel, the limited threshold of pain. That is when empathy fails.

 In what ways do you find empathy difficult? (in daily life or as a writer)

You stopped writing a while ago because you felt as if you were failing your subjects. Can a Pakistani writer only good at writing in English, write the narratives of her people, her people who speak Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Saraiki—everything but a smattering of English? Can you write their narratives so fully embodied in their everyday language in a foreign language? So much gets lost in translation, so much gets lost, that the flavor of authenticity lost in the garnishing of pretentiousness just doesn’t work. Not in fiction. Not in poetry. Can you even understand fully where they are from? They toil in the fields, they take public transport, they eat a single meal a day that costs as much as your daily cup of English breakfast tea. How can you tell the truthful narratives of those you hardly know anything about? Will you do them justice? You once wrote a story on your waxing woman once in second person. You remember being so proud of it, showing it off in a writing workshop, thinking you had finally captured the true essence of empathy--whatever that is:

“She wobbles dizzily to her mahogany dresser, her footsteps making a sticky crunch as remnants of wax stick to the marble floor.”

So proud until one person hesitatingly asked, “Can a woman with no education whatsoever tell what mahogany is?”

In that moment, as a writer, you knew empathy is a process that would require constant revision, rewriting and never being completely sure whether you had every facet covered.

A set of questions answered and you wonder whether you are some good at empathy or not. Wonder whether the very fact that you had to struggle to answer a set of questions asking you how you feel about empathy is in fact the failure of empathy itself.