I spent the bulk of my weekend helping at out a friend’s wedding. I showed up with my typical “introvert who can act like a extrovert” and Type A personality, saw setup was unhinged chaos with no clear leader, and soon earned myself the nickname “HBIC” (head-b***h-in-charge). I spent the rest of the weekend simultaneously exhausted and with guests, vendors, and the like assuming I was the wedding coordinator.
Gratefully, my HBIC behavior was wildly appreciated and the bride let everyone know I was a guest who setting the bar real damn high. (Happy to help, girl. Congrats!)
And all I want to do now is sleep.
Did the Type A behavior wipe me out? Not really.
Did the introvert masquerading as extrovert do me in? A little.
So what ultimately has me wanting to cap this off like right here and take a nap?
Empathy.
Probably my strongest skillset as both a human and a community manager. And arguably the one I’d actually like to turn off 99.8% of the time.
I very rarely write or see a community manager job description out there that doesn’t have “empathy” listed somewhere in the necessary skillset. I usually sandwich it somewhere between “strong communicator” and “comfortable with ambiguity” which probably makes most people think I ran out of things to write and I’m just going with some variation of word salad.
But, I stand behind those three things - especially empathy. I actually just wish I could find the job description appropriate level words for the depth of empathy.
“You can read between lines so unwritten and so hidden that people think you can read minds.”
“You can deeply channel the anger, frustration, joy, and excitement of others as if it’s your own experience.”
“You can tell when someone needs a break, intervention, or distraction before they even know.”
So needless to say, yeah - your nerd gal over here is tired after feeling all the feels of everyone else and doing a whole lot about it.
The problem with the whole job description bit is that when I write “must be empathetic” - I actually haven’t met a human yet that didn’t have empathy. We all have it. Some of us are just more in tune with it. Some of us listen to it more. Some of us can blissfully ignore it and run at a sustainable level (alas, that is not me).
My hypothesis is that us community managers just have the empathy setting set to 11 (at least) at all freaking times. And I suspect, people with empathy settings at 10+ are drawn to specific types of careers, with community being one of those.
If you do this type of work, you know what I’m talking about. We see color in messages that look ordinary to everyone else, we can read the undertones of a GIF like nobody’s business, and we always always always know the temperature of a room, meeting, event, etc. well before everyone else. We can feel the frustration of a pissed off user, the elation of a colleague, and are constantly riding an emotional roller coaster - while usually ignoring our own emotions. Nifty.
And I’m not saying all this to make it sound like special kind of suffering, martyrdom, or super power. I just think it’s interesting because we don’t normally talk about empathy like a tangible thing. We don’t quantify like it we would resolved support tickets, assigned customer accounts, etc.
But my career and this weekend are living proof for me that empathy is tangible, empathy in quantity is exhausting, and sustained high levels of empathy can cause burnout.
And now you’re going “Ok, great. Jillian is going to drop some immense wisdom here?”
Nope.
I’ll be very honest here and say I don’t know what to do with this empathy-at-11 setting long term, but I’m not sure I’d change it either. I’m a servant leader and my love language is acts of service. I’m exhausted, but knowing that I was able to do so much subtle (and not so subtle) good this weekend to ensure my friend had a great wedding - I’ll take the exhaustion.
So… that’s me. Now time to go touch some grass, not make eye contact with anyone, and try to avoid emotions - mine or anyone else’s.
I feel seen. Thank you.
It's hard to maintain balance when empathy, kindness, and proactivity are your default settings. We need to balance ourselves with our non-work passions and rest. Easier said than done, I know. The world needs more people like us now more than ever.