Excess sympathy

I've been noticing about myself recently that little things that people do that make themselves seem vulnerable make me feel sad. I don't know what it is about vulnerability, but I see the littlest things and sometimes I project a whole, tragic existence onto a person and feel terribly bad for them. Even something as little as seeing someone cough.

The weird thing is that I do all of the things that make me sad when I see other people do them. I cough, I sneeze, I rub my eyes, I often seem tired, sometimes I snag my clothes on things. And none of those things makes me feel bad for myself at all. I feel totally fine while I'm doing them and not in need of sympathy or anything else. And yet when other people do those things, I feel sorry for them. Even though in my head I know they don't need anyone feeling sorry for them, or if they do it's not because they're coughing or whatever.

When I was in high school, my mom had this idea that she was going to slip greeting cards with $20 bills in them to random people without them seeing. Except that she wasn't the type of person to actually do that, so I was supposed to be the one who actually snuck up to the person and somehow slipped them the card. The first time was around the holidays, so the card read "Happy New Year." We were at the grocery store and my mom picked out a guy whose cart she wanted me to put the card in when he wasn't looking.

But I got shy all of a sudden, and worried that he would see me and think I was crazy. It was an older man, tall but slightly stooped. He was wearing an acrylic sweater and polyester pants and he was slowly examining canned vegetables. I told my mom I didn't think he looked poor, and I meant it. He just seemed like a guy in pants and a sweater to me, deciding what groceries to purchase. But now, in retrospect, I realize that my mom was probably right--his clothes were clearly quite inexpensive and also not very warm considering that it was winter, and he was probably not scrutinizing the canned green beans out of mere curiosity but rather making a decision about the price he would have to pay for them.

The memory of that man and his can of green beans and his acrylic sweater, which I can still picture perfectly in this kind of buttery yellow colour, makes me really sad. It makes me wish I had just gotten myself together and stuck that card in his shopping cart. It was just $20. But I bet he could have used it, and I wish I had done it.