Error 404: Empathy Not Found

For the longest time, I thought I had it all figured out. I mean, I knew things. I could psychoanalyze your trauma before you even told me your zodiac sign (Leo rising, daddy issues, noted). I had enough knowledge to write a TED Talk and enough detachment to ghost myself halfway through it.

My emotions? Optimized for efficiency. No buffering, no lag. Just facts, vibes, and a few sarcastic remarks to keep things spicy. I wasn’t cold—I was “emotionally minimalist.” Empathy? Please. That sounded like an app I deleted to save space.

Then came her.

We’ll call her Nora, because I’m not trying to get sued. Nora had this calm energy, like someone who drinks herbal tea and doesn’t scream internally during small talk. One night, while we were spiraling through a conversation that started with astrology memes and somehow ended on childhood grief (classic), she said something that glitched my system.

“My grandmother used to hum when she baked,” she said. “I still hear it sometimes, in the quiet. Like she left a little piece of herself behind.”

Cue my usual programming: nod, reference how auditory memory is stored in the hippocampus, sprinkle in a quote from Carl Jung, and boom—emotional connection simulated. But mid-sentence, she just looked at me. No blinking. No buffering. Just a look that screamed, That’s not what I asked for, robot boy.

And in that moment, I realized: oh no.

I had become that guy. The “well actually” friend. The therapist without a license. The human equivalent of a Buzzfeed quiz titled “Are You Emotionally Unavailable or Just Really Into Stoicism?”

So, I shut up. Like, really shut up.

No witty retort. No psych facts. Just me and the hum of a metaphorical oven I’d never stood beside.

It was horrifying. Not because I didn’t know what to say—but because I suddenly wanted to feel something instead of explain it. And feelings are… gross. They’re sticky, they make you cry during Subaru commercials, and they can’t be resolved with a YouTube video essay.

But I stayed in it.

I asked what the humming sounded like. I imagined it: cinnamon in the air, the soft shuffle of slippers on a linoleum floor, and a tune that didn’t need words to mean I love you. I couldn’t relate. But I could witness it.

And that’s when the transformation happened. No flashy music. No anime power-up sequence. Just one moment of terrifying, silent presence.

You know how in every coming-of-age movie there’s that one scene where the protagonist stares into the mirror and suddenly understands the weight of the human condition? This was mine. Except instead of a mirror, it was the black screen of my phone because I’d been doomscrolling for five hours after that conversation, thinking, Wow. Am I the problem?

Spoiler: yes. But also, not anymore.

From that night on, I started listening differently. Like, really listening—not just waiting for my turn to talk. I stopped trying to be a walking Google search of trauma responses. I gave space. I let silences sit. Sometimes I even felt things—which is both empowering and a deeply inconvenient side effect of personal growth.

I still glitch sometimes. My first instinct is to fix, to explain, to quote a philosopher I saw once on TikTok. But then I remember Nora’s look. And I slow down.

Because knowing something isn’t the same as understanding it.

Understanding? That takes presence. Vulnerability. And, occasionally, crying in your car at 2AM because you remembered a childhood memory you swore didn’t affect you anymore (it did).

So yeah. I’m different now.

Still sarcastic. Still overthinking. But now, if you tell me a story about your grandmother humming in the kitchen, I won’t respond with “fun fact about neural imprinting.”

I’ll just ask you what the song sounded like.

And I’ll mean it.