"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." ~Socrates

I've learned something about myself. Something I've always known, but never quite understood the why of the matter.
I force myself into feeling the world's evil. It is something I have never been able to control and have never shared with the people around me as I fear the look of disgust that can be found on so many faces when my fixation is brought to light.
I will watch the dirtiest of porn scenes and force myself to watch it from beginning to end. I'm not aroused by it, I don't enjoy it in any fashion. I watch to see this woman demean herself in the most disturbing manner, as I pity her and can't fathom why she allowed the situation to happen. I watch to try and understand why she would hurt herself in such a physically painful, mentally destructible, and emotionally disturbing practice. I watch to see her hurt and take it into myself. I watch because I care for her well-being. I watch, looking for signs that I might have this same evil inside of me. I don't, I know, but I will keep looking.
I look for the saddest documentaries and, thus, my love for HBO. I watch the America Undercover docs over and over and over. I will watch as a junkie sells her body for $5 and a pack of smokes. I will watch as a dealer curses another sad soul who desperately cries for another fix. I watch as a woman cries in despair and contemplates suicide because she can't get out of the homeless, prostituting junkie life she has fallen into. I watch not because I find these lives interesting, but because I want to take in their pain and suffering, and verify that there isn't a possibility of the situation happening to me.
I'll watch tragic events unfold on the news for hours...sometimes days. An example of this was September 11th. I'd wake up in the morning and turn on CNN just to watch the horror before I had to go to work. I'd come home at lunch to watch it again. I'd come home in the evenings just to watch it some more until my husband would get home and make me change the channel. I'd hope that he'd fall asleep on the couch just so I could turn it back and make myself relive repeatedly the macabre scene of people jumping from the buildings, the horror of the people on the streets, the terror of the smoke and debris rolling through the city...
I didn't do this because I found it entertaining. I did it because I wanted to feel their sadness, understand their pain, and cope with the evil of the events that day. I didn't want my pain for them to be for nothing, I didn't want to stop crying for fear that my feeling might dry out.
It's not just TV.
I choose books with emotionally draining endings. I read the scene of the young Irishman dying of hundreds of water moccasin bites in Lonesome Dove 20 + times before going on with the story.
I read magazines that report all of the sad and horrific events going on around the world. You will always find a copy of Time and National Geographic on my desk.
If there is an altercation unfolding in front of me at the grocery store I will stand there and watch....
As I said at the beginning, I've always known about my fixation as I can remember this behavior from as early as 5 years old sneaking down in the middle of night to turn on Showtime to see either pornographic or horror movies, before I even understood what they were doing. I've just always been engrossed with the moral wrong-doing of man.
This is where my realization of understanding comes in. You see, I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator a personality test that defines you according to Carl Jung's findings. As Jung was a favorite of mine in college psych, I figured I'd give it a try and found that as much as I know who I am I've never understood why it is that I am...the test helped me out tremendously to find out the why's of my inner being.
I'm not crazy or unstable. I am an emotional rollercoaster, full of too much love and sensitive to other's pain and now picture myself as a Sin Eater of legend...I think that makes me kind of special, wouldn't you agree?

Portrait of a Healer Idealist per Keirsey.com:

Healers can come to develop a
certain fascination with the problem of good and evil, sacred and profane.
Healers are drawn toward purity, but can become engrossed with the profane,
continuously on the lookout for the wickedness that lurks within them. Others seldom detect
this inner turmoil, however, for the struggle between good and evil is
within the Healer, who does not feel compelled to make the issue public.


I highly recommend this test . You know who you are, now try to understand why you are the person you know yourself to be.