I feel invisible, so I want the world to have more empathy.

I now realize that I was forced to become an introvert. 

It genuinely wasn’t a choice that I made, it was just who I am and have always been. I can’t exactly change it in any way, exactly in the same light that I will never stop being disabled, queer, nonbinary, or Filipino. 

It is quite literally in my blood and in my very existence – a neurobiological reality as strong as the other sociological identities that I hold dear.

But, as time has gone on, and now being in my thirties – loneliness has been bothering me – a lot. And I have spent the past year trying to change these patterns and began to realize that loneliness was my default because I was given no other choice.

And we know this.

We know that there are people that society has just neglected to the point that they feel better off alone, this person may even be you.

For me, this has led to many friendships failing and many others becoming neglected. I literally don’t know how to stay being friends with people and, in many ways, I’m not even given the chance. People used to use therapy talk, so much, to gaslight me to where I simply began to dissociate and detach from the world, even while being connected.

And many people aren’t given a chance to be themselves, to show their worth, or to provide value. They’re simply caught in a perpetual space where they exist, floating in life rather than given the chance to have space for their ideas to be validated, pursued or valued.

This is the importance of listening, reading, and understanding what it’s like to be different.

Because we spend far too much time wasting time by ignoring the issues of people at the margins when listening to them could have easily created better solutions than we have now.

We constantly have tone-deaf rhetoric in Congress about “ending racism”, when providing reparations for Black Americans, honoring treaties made with Native Americans, acknowledging America’s long history of exploiting Asian American and Pacific Islander labor and lands, and providing reparative accommodations for all racialized people are important first steps that are necessary for racial healing. 

Better yet, these communities have been stating this for a very long time, but we choose not to listen or understand, instead, we avoid guilt for these harms by overcomplicating these issues, to the point that even some of my fellow racialized people share this perspective.

In the same way, Israel vs Palestine is not a complicated issue, Palestinians were always in that land, descended from Jews, a genetic reality that’s been proven by numerous studies, and Palestinians are also Muslim, Christian, Druze, Bedouin and even Jewish. The West, however, still refuses to acknowledge this fact beyond the simple-minded “Israel shouldn’t be bombing babies” when, in fact, Israel should not be occupying either Gaza or the West Bank in the first place.

This is why we need empathy, because we are simply too blinded by our own ignorance, which comes in the form of our biases, beliefs, and prejudices. 

Empathy for others can give us the understanding that we need to affirm people, and view the important issues of our time, and the many issues of different communities, from more empathetic lens.

Social responsibility is a real thing, after all. When we neglect our social responsibility to care for others and to give a damn, we lose the very essence of our collective humanity. The human spirit is not in our individuality, it is in our ability to cooperate, collaborate and create solutions that benefit us all, rather than advantage one group over another, or systemically forsake the needs of any single person or group.

Empathy is the only virtue that has led the world towards compassion, collective empathy is what we need to tackle the social issues, and the global issues, of our time.

Thus, I want to promote empathy, because diversity, equity and inclusion are not enough when we lack the empathy necessary to fully see the humanity in humans, in all of the diversity of forms that we present as.

My mission is for humans to unite, and do my part in making that happen.