energy vampire

aaron started watching a tv show on FX about vampires so we watched an episode together last week, it's a comedy and pretty dumb but it did make me laugh a few times so i think i like it. most of the characters are vampiric in a traditional sense; they kill and store humans in a basement to drink their blood, they transform into bats in order to travel more quickly, etc. but one of the characters is an "energy vampire" who garners sustenance by speaking to the coworkers at his office job and to the other vampires too frequently and in a manner that drains them of their ability to communicate with him or with anyone. some of the characters fall asleep when he speaks to them. 

his character was one of the funnier parts of the show. something i've thought and talked about a lot for a few years is how the way i operate externally and function internally can be overwhelmingly influenced by the energy that i perceive and receive from the people who i interact with and observe in my life.

one example that comes to mind is about a girl who runs one of my favorite meme accounts. a lot of what she reposts is content made by the black, american, teenage part of the internet. i'm comfortable going as far as to say that i think they're the only people still creating genuinely smart and funny content on the internet in 2019. throughout her nearly 24/7 meme stream she also intermittently includes personal posts; cute selfies, cute semi-censored nudes of herself, cute lighthearted posts about the food she is eating or the friends she is hanging out with. i don't know her well personally but my roommate has known her for years and she is close friends with a boy who i dated for a couple of months last year and became and remain friends with. through both of those sources i know that she has struggled with being suicidal and been hospitalized on more than one occasion. the extent of our interactions IRL have been limited to chatting at a party a long time ago where she was blacked out, singing Why Not by Hilary Duff into a karaoke machine together at the beautiful apartment of a rich friend of the aforementioned boy on his birthday, running into her while she was on a date with a potential sugar daddy who she decided she wanted to get away from (which my roommate helped her do), and the last time i saw her. 

the last time we saw each other was at one of the parties that happen in unnamed spaces up 3+ flights of stairs inside a door next to a chinese jewelry store on canal street where you end up knowing nearly everyone, and everyone who you don't know looks just like someone you do know. i'm not sure what had happened to her earlier in the night but by the time she approached me and my roommate she was either incapable of or unwilling to form a full sentence and collapsed into our laps on one of the few spots left open to sit amidst all of the sweaty bodies and indoor cigarettes. it was a really gross couch. after she comforted her and tried to get her to speak for a few minutes, my roommate got up to talk to a boy or a friend or a boyfriend and i was left with this girls head in my lap, bleary eyed, unlocking and relocking her phone. i had my hand on her shoulder and while i had absolutely no idea what was happening in her head or her life, i felt overwhelmingly sad. or empathetic. i'm not sure what exactly i felt but it wasn't fun. my roommate came back and so did a group of cute girls who immediately engaged with the corpse in my lap and expressed their concern and pulled her to the other side of the couch with them, so i said something like "fuck this!" to my roommate and we moved to the other side of the room, closer to the bar. i think i ended up sitting cross-legged on a plastic folding table and talking about myself to a group of friends and girls who are more interesting than i am.

i was very drunk (the alcohol was free, i think the party was affiliated with an art thing? a fair? frieze? i don't remember) and probably on cocaine, i don't remember. regardless, i couldn't shake the way it made me feel to see this person in the state that they were and to feel her energy through her body while it touched mine. i felt exhausted. despite having lots of friends still there, and an open bar, i ended up irish-goodbye-ing and walking home like 20 minutes later and going to sleep. 

this was a person i'm not even friends with! another weird example i can think of is when i can tell that a friend of mine has facetuned or photoshopped their face or body in an instagram photo in a manner thats probably undetectable to most, but to me—who has worked as a retoucher, spends 8 hours in adobe programs a day at my office, has a mercury placement in scorpio, and accidentally/immediately memorizes the faces of every person i love—is glaringly apparent. it makes me sad and it makes me wish i had a way to make them feel like they didn't need to lie about the way they look on the internet. it makes me think about what else is going on deeper that has manifested in their bodies and the apps on their phones. 

when my mom tells me how lovely a weekend trip was that she took with my father, who i know has ruined her life and broken her heart and still continues to on a semi-monthly basis, it breaks my heart too. well, it used to. now i usually just try to respond kindly, hang up, and then meditate or run across and back on either the williamsburg or manhattan bridge. my parents are two people who i know not to feel responsible for anymore, because i know that i can't. 

i think it's ultimately a good thing about me, and its better than drinking human blood. i think just i need to learn how to turn it into something advantageous and positive for myself and for other people. i think i need to give more energy than i receive. i have a lot of good energy to give. is there a word for the opposite of vampire?