For a counselor who is a telepath, there is a certain art to feeling others’ pain and helping them make sense of it without making it your own. Like many of her generation, Taran Madar struggles with this. The sociologists on Betazed say it comes from having come into the fullness of their psionic abilities at the height of the Dominion War, when the whole planet cried out in fear and suffering, then sorrow.
Taran thinks it’s just the way she is.
Even as a little girl, before she could be properly called an empath, whenever someone was sad, she became sad, too, and tried to fix it. She remembers her parents clearly telling her, “This is the last one” after she gave away her favorite stuffed flanarian to a crying child in the market. It had already been replaced three times.
When puberty hit a year too soon, so did her depression. Her perception of other people’s pain was no longer safely contained within the walls of her childish understanding. Suddenly, she felt everything they felt, exactly as they felt it – whether or not she was ready for those emotions, or the knowledge of what caused them. Love, arousal, terror, grief ... she felt all these things and more, and it was far too much. Her parents tried to help, but their worry for her only drove her deeper into the darkness.
At thirteen, she tried to drown herself in the Opal Sea in an unsuccessful attempt to wash away the pain. It was hours before dawn, and the world was asleep. In the quiet of her own thoughts, she decided to fade away, before the morning light arrived, and with it, other people’s voices, other people’s burdens.
Either she was lucky or it was fate – or maybe a parent’s instinct, she thinks now that she is older – that her father woke up when he did. His body needed only to relieve itself, but it was she who needed relief of a different kind, and when he sensed her tortured presence moving into the waves, determined and terrified, he ran straight past the lavatory, out of the house and into the sea, sweeping her into his arms and carrying her home, even as she thrashed and kicked and begged to die.
In the hospital, she learned for the first time that her paracortex was abnormally densely networked, meaning her misery was born not of weakness, but of unusual strength. She spent three months there learning to process emotions – both hers and those of others – and another two years in therapy. Along the way, she found her purpose. Her counselors had saved her life, and she knew what she planned to do with it: Help others as they had helped her.
Fourteen years later, she looks around the crowded sickbay of the USS Tesseract, feeling every bit of the terror, anguish and sorrow she felt when she was a newly empathic teenage girl in the middle of a warzone. This time, though, she has the tools. Respecting both privacy and regulations, she effortlessly blocks out the conscious thoughts of the injured, the worried, the grieving, and lets their emotions be her guide instead. After a moment’s deliberation, she selects her first patient – a quiet Deltan boy about twelve years old. He feels everything, too. She senses him absorbing the melancholy that surrounds them like a sponge, trying in his childish way to relieve the others’ pain. But he’s too young. He’s not ready for this.
She goes to him, and can’t help but think about the girl she used to be, the one who chose drowning in salt water over drowning in other people’s tears. She feels the boy reaching out with his nascent gifts, trying to fill the vacuum left by other people’s grief, and knows that if he continues like this, then one day not too far from now, he’ll climb into an airlock and decide to try to fill the vacuum for real.
“Hi,” she says softly, and he looks up at her, his brown eyes huge against his smooth bald head. “My name is Taran. What’s yours?” she asks, and offers him her hand. When he takes it, she squeezes gently, breaking regs just long enough to tell him silently, You don't have to carry this alone.