The Empathy Burnout

bojack horseman, micro epiphanies & the movie i'd seen before

I saw a movie about a year ago that had an unpleasant ending. A month ago, I saw that same movie, under the illusion that it would end differently. Obviously, it didn’t. What makes this movie more emotionally taxing is that it’s a lived experience — a friendship I had to end, much against my will.

One thing I get a lot from people is how deeply I love and how seriously I take all my friendships. While this is said without ill intentions, I’ve come to resent it. I found that love was causing me to tolerate certain situations I had no business enduring. What plunged me into this self-loathing? A fallout I had with someone I considered a best friend, and I guess it’s been one of the worst things I’ve encountered so far.

I believe in second chances and the ability of humans to change for the better. Things happen, and even though people may mess up once or twice, they still deserve some grace. Which is why when said ‘friend’ messed up, I forgave and reconnected with them. Not once. Not twice. Thrice. And they were all for the same thing.

Sigh.

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2025 [May-December]

I stopped hearing from them for a couple of weeks. While it was a bit jarring considering the time we spent together — talking about anything and everything and speaking almost every day, I figured they were busy. They lived in a completely different country and time zone, and other constraints existed. I really wasn’t expecting us to be in constant communication, so I was as understanding as I could be.

This went on for about a month and a half. I sent a few messages, trying to check up on them because I was genuinely worried. Having someone you’re not in physical proximity to, just disappearing and remaining unreachable, is definitely a cause for concern. Eventually, they reached out, explaining that they were busy with summer programmes, work and other engagements.

Granted, that was understandable. But I did mention that I needed a heads up to at least know they were fine and that I wasn’t being ignored. Things were smoothed out eventually.

That was what I thought, though.

Once again, without warning or a heads-up, they disappeared after a few weeks of stable communication. I found this very weird and borderline disrespectful because they kept sending ‘snaps’ to me while ignoring my messages and calls, despite maintaining an active presence on their social media. They were having a ball, and there I was, being ignored and feeling like they were going through the absolute worst situation.

I thought they would eventually reach out, but after a month of this, I stopped sending messages or doing anything. And so things just fizzled out. We would not be in communication with each other for the next three to four months.

During these months, I felt there was something I had done to cause this rift. Surely I had said something out of pocket, or maybe they were just going through something. Was I a bad friend? What exactly was the cause of this, and why were they active everywhere and ignoring my calls, texts and everything that has to do with my existence?

I felt like a ghost. A very dejected ghost.

In hindsight, this was a very harmful way of processing everything, and I’m glad the new friendships I formed during that time helped me become a better person. Even though thinking about the fallout felt like a whiplash, I got better, and I guess I even started forgetting about this person. I was so proud of the progress, as well as the better friendships I had made along the way.

The strength of this progress was tested in December when I woke up to long blocks of text messages from them. They basically apologised for ignoring me, the distance, explaining they had a lot on their plate, and how I was ‘very high up’ on their list of people they had wronged. One of the things that stood out to me in this entire apology was this:

I do want to assure you that if for any reason I can’t be around I’ll let you know why. I promise to be a better friend to you and I promise to always be there in the capacity that I can whenever I can.

Against my friends’ reservations, I considered everything. Initially, I was indignant — during this entire friendship, there were other things they had done that I had turned a blind eye to. While I was genuinely happy for every milestone they reached and hyped them up each time they wanted to do something, they’d get really quiet when it was my turn. I never heard from them on my birthday last year, which was one of the worst of my life, and their general lack of consideration definitely didn’t make me feel good.

Also, why had it taken them almost four months to realise they had done something terrible, and subsequently apologise?

I included all these things in my response, and let’s just say that after a long back and forth, I agreed to reconnect with them and be friends. The assurance of giving a heads-up was definitely one of the contributing factors for this reconnection. I believed they could change, and this was the time for redemption, whatever that looked like.

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May, 2026

Usually, when a friendship is patched up, it never goes back to how it was, and sometimes, it just ends because nobody sees the point in holding onto something that doesn’t feel familiar. However, I never experienced this awkward phase with said friend. If anything, we got much closer, and it seemed to me for the first few months of the year that they had really redeemed themself. I was thankful that I had decided to forgive and reconnect with them.

They became one of my best friends, and everything seemed very perfect in my life. But as usual, this is usually the part of the story where things start to go downhill for the main character, and that‘s exactly what happened to me.

If you’ve read my previous essay, “Decentre Your Friends?”,(please read it if you haven’t :)) I speak about how I had decided to make my birthday a really special one, and one of the measures I took to realise that goal was to send a document to 11 of my friends so they could complete it and send it back to me. In the days leading up to my birthday, I carried a weird sense of foreboding. I felt something bad would happen and possibly ruin that day, making all the efforts I had put into making it better for myself a waste. I tried to shake it off several times, believing everybody would show up for me and convincing myself that there was nothing to worry about.

10 out of the 11 did send their responses, and their messages were very heartwarming, and I loved every single bit of it. I felt grateful and extremely loved by every one of them. The one person who had failed to do this was this same friend who had done something similar last year, and had just been very weird during the week leading to my birthday.

In that same essay, I admit to feeling dejected, incomplete joy, disappointment, sadness and everything in between, coupled with my epiphany about how much I had centred this friend as well as the need to put an end to it.

After two weeks of this situation consuming my thoughts and not even hearing from this person, I decided to do what I do best.

Confront.

Perhaps the scariest thing about confrontation is how disappointing it can get quickly. You often go in with a hopeful heart, thinking it’s going to solve everything, and instead, it either turns into deflection or brings an abrupt end to your relationship with someone. I think that’s why most people tend to avoid it, and that’s fine. Not me, though.

In hopes of getting some sort of explanation, I sent them a message addressing their distance, their actions and inactions and everything else. It reminded me of myself last year and how I had gone through the same thing. This pattern baffled me, and I hated myself for going through this once again.

They responded in less than five minutes. The explanation was the same as last year’s — they were going through a lot, had signed up for demanding classes, didn’t have social skills and had struggled with friendships since they were a child. The messages and explanations just kept on coming, and they wholeheartedly agreed that they were the problem and I hadn’t done anything wrong.

This didn’t comfort me in the slightest. To be honest, it irritated my soul. Of course, I didn’t mind the fact that they had a lot to do (don’t we all?). My issue, as I had brought up several times, was the lack of consideration that would have driven them to give me a heads-up instead of having me do all these mental gymnastics just to figure out what was going on with them.

This apology stunt irritated and disturbed me because this person was very much aware of what they were doing. They had all the right words and explanations for everything going on, and they accepted they were in the wrong for every single thing. However, this did not translate to changed behaviour or a basic level of consideration. They knew the patterns repeating were extremely harmful, but it seemed their awareness had coddled them into believing they were actually changing instead of running around in circles.

This became very clear to me when they said they were actually changing, and they were sure of this because they had actually replied to my message.

In that moment, all I could think about was Todd Chavez from BoJack Horseman.

“You can’t keep doing this! You can’t keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay! You need to be better!”

This quote echoes in my mind at least once a day, and it was extremely loud when I read those messages. It triggered a lot of what I call ‘micro epiphanies’ that keep me up at night, leading to this essay.

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M.E 1: Being Self-Aware ≠ Change

Being self-aware doesn’t automatically lead to change. For most, the first step to change is to be able to point to your mistakes and acknowledge them. The mistake is that we often end there. It’s very easy to get comfortable finding every single reason that may account for your flaws, so much so that you start conflating it with actually changing.

Besides my ‘friend’, the other person who made this painfully true to me was BoJack. He knew exactly what made him a terrible partner and friend — his childhood trauma stemming from abusive parents, leading to finding solace in alcohol and drugs, his self-loathing… BoJack had all those things figured out. But each time he had an opportunity to change for the better, he just wouldn’t. Some disaster would come up, and he’d get into a poignant soliloquy about how messed up he was because of everything that had happened to him since birth.

As much as those things could explain his actions, they didn’t justify them in any way. And what made it worse was that he indicated zero interest in actually putting in the work to change (for the first few seasons of the show) because he had subconsciously grown comfortable with his explanations. Just mess up, throw a pity party with your childhood trauma as the piñata, and constantly beat it till it bursts for everyone to suddenly feel bad for you, even though you’re the antagonist here.

That was why Todd’s growing disenchantment with BoJack meant a lot to me and mirrored the exact situation I was in.

“You can’t keep doing this! You can’t keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay! You need to be better!”

As painful as it is, no one else can change such a person besides themself. Which is why, towards the end of the show, even though Todd remained cordial with BoJack and showed up for him in times of need, the emotional investment and proximity were visibly absent due to BoJack’s lack of initiative.

Todd was well within his rights to do that, and so was I.

M.E 2: It’s All You

Resolving to distance myself from the situation and this person was initially a difficult thing for me. This was one of my best friends, someone who, albeit their flaws, had listened to me rant about several things and understood me no matter how complex I thought my feelings were. How many people were going to do that for me? I felt I wasn’t going to find their kind in other people for the foreseeable future.

It took another friend of mine experiencing something similar to this to realise what we both needed to hear — people are as special as you make them.

Everything this person was to me was all ME! I had opened up to them and given them a lot of information about myself. Yes, we had a few mutual interests, but had I not left the door open for them to get to know me on a deeper level, they would have been a regular friend who knew basic things about me. There was nothing inherently special about anything we had besides the chances we had given each other to grow closer.

With this in mind, detaching from the entire situation was much easier. At the end of the day, if I had the power to make someone special to me, I could undo it. And I did!

M.E 3: On Consideration

Consideration, to a lot of people, is the highest form of love. The thought of someone, a friend, a relative or a partner taking your feelings into account before acting or making a decision is definitely heartwarming. While I also believe consideration is a great expression of love, I also think we’ve outsourced it to the people in our lives. So much so that we leave ourselves out of it.

And so in my bid to ‘decentre’ this person, I had to come to terms with the number of times I had allowed them to make me feel a certain type of way by being inconsiderate. My thing is simple — if they were going to be inconsiderate towards me, it was up to me to consider my self-worth and feelings and decide what best served me. I owed it to myself the most to trust myself not to stay in situations that served as avenues to disrespect and disregard me. And so I did just that.

I got tired of consistently extending empathy to someone who was not ready to translate self-awareness into actively changing, and it was in my best interest to remove myself from the entire situation.

If consideration is indeed the highest form of love, why wouldn’t I consider myself?

M.E 4: All Roads Lead to You

All roads led to the boundaries I broke.

Eventually, the soft spot I had for this person had cost me a lot. Had I stood on business when they had reached out in December, I guess things would have been way different.

While I still believe people can change to an extent, and extending grace is important, in the future, I’m not compromising my boundaries, self-respect or interests to accommodate someone all in the name of ‘giving grace’. The more I kept doing that, the more my level of self-trust would be eroded, and I wouldn’t want to be in that position. Because when it’s all said and done, you’re the one who won’t be able to sleep well at night because you keep beating yourself up over continuous and consistent disrespect. And this was exactly what happened to me.

There’s a lot of nuance to it, but honestly, this situation could’ve easily been avoided.

I’ve learned to detach my self-worth from all these situations. Someone messing up or exhibiting certain harmful behaviours isn’t my fault. I’m not a builder or potter who used faulty materials or terrible techniques to form a shaky friendship or relationship. And so that person messing up is on them, and not on me.

Lastly, even though moving on from this experience has been tough, taking the advice of my friend and also deciding the friendship wasn’t good for me (because if it were, I wouldn’t be going through all this!) has been the final nail in the coffin. Life goes on, and there are still a lot of people to meet and experience. That comforts me in several ways that I can express, and so at the end of the day, life goes on.

The empathy burnout, and with all these micro-epiphanies, you owe yourself a lot. Placing it in any other person’s hands is dangerous, and I’m glad I realised this on time. Please do not stay in situations for excessively long periods, even when they’re obviously not serving you properly.🥭

same, Prince. same.

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江山易改，本性难移

[Rivers and mountains are easy to change; a person’s nature is hard to alter]

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, check my previous essay out