Not the Right Type of Feeling

Before my mind went to beer-induced mush yesterday (incidentally before I wrote the previous post), I was talking with Tim at the bar about night out on Halloween. During that evening/morning, our drunken adventure led us to a complete stranger's apartment where we hung out with some cool people. Even while being drunk, I remember having a great conversation with this girl.

We talked mostly about her life; how she feels that everything has been going wrong lately and that she just can't get anything meaningful. She talked about her own adoption from Costa Rica, her recent graduation at the age of 28 and her debt. She felt like everything about herself was a failure. Her tattoo was even a reminder of things going wrong, since the artist did a really shitty job. To generalize, it was a pretty emo and depressing talk.

From the beginning of our interaction, I felt a weird attraction to her. Nothing sex related, but more in the sense that I understood part of her. I generally find myself empathizing with people who's lives are done-and-out. This is obviously not for anyone, but those whom I get the impression they don't deserve the consistent bad luck/bad decisions that have gone their way. I feel like together we share something in common, since a lot of my life wasn't happy either.

Jumping a step further though, when I'm in these empathetic moods I start feeling the need to make them feel better. This sounds really corny, but it's like I want to protect them from the sadness. I tend to especially get like this around women. With the girl from Halloween, I started actually hitting on her because I knew it would make her feel better. I would share selective bits about myself that I knew she would find attractive, such as when I worked in Costa Rica for a summer, and I would point out the positives of her situation. I pretty much gave her my exclusive attention that night. Toward the ending of our stay, I even considered asking for her number just because that would make her feel good about herself.

Looking back at that, as I told Tim about it, really just occurs to me as fucked up. Trying to improve a person's mood is one thing, but seriously hitting on them is another. I'm gay and I intentionally dodged questions such as "So why are you single" just to hide it from her and so that I could keep my act going. This isn't even the first time I've done this! It's like I just lose myself in the hopes of pleasing someone else.

Sometimes I just don't understand myself. I realize that at times I want to be the protective figure for someone, holding them in my arms just to protect them from the figurative pain in the world. But honestly, I think that's taking it too far. I need to be real to myself and everyone around me and not just lie outright at the hopes of making one person temporarily happy. The world is about taking the bad with the good anyway.

Even reading other peoples' blogs I sometimes get that feeling. When anyone reads a post about a person, you interpret the event/story/thought so subjectively, based on your own views or potentially 1-dimensional image of the author. Some blogs and posts I read stir up that intense protective and fucked-up feeling to make that person feel better and hide them away from the bad things in life. It doesn't even matter to me that I know almost nothing about the guy/girl. Let's be honest with me too, that level of "feeling" is kind of creepy right?

I consider my emotions and empathy a good thing, but acting like this can't be good - for the other person or myself. Maybe I should build up a thicker skin or something.
I'm not too sure what else to say, so I'll leave it at that.