1/) Here are my 4¢ (inflation): Empathy, like almost all primate traits, is on a spectrum, more or less. Think Lt. Deanna Troi on one end and Ted Bundy on the other. Most of us are somewhere in between. Belle, it sounds like you lean more toward Troi, whereas Trump and folks https://twitter.com/TurnipsBride/status/1321701502822526978

2/) like Dick Cheney, and choose-another-serial-killer are toward the Bundy end of the spectrum. We tend to be born on the spectrum with a little play in the knobs too, that is to say, life can hammer us a little bit more one way or the other than where we started- the whole

3/) Nature/Nurture argument. When we no longer needed tails and fangs and claws, our brains got bigger. We knew the importance of needing one another. This allowed us to work in teams to bring down the mastodon or fend off the wolves; empathy allowed us to live long enough

4/) to pass our traits along to the next generation. Nature ratchets up that which works and tends to discard that which does not. Like anything else in science, there are outliers- anomalies that make us scratch our heads. Science is less "Eureka!"

5/) and more, "huh, that's weird . . ." So, not for the first time we look at Belle and go, "Huh, that's weird," because perhaps you're farther on the high empathy end of the spectrum than the low. Using the terms 'biological' and/or 'evolutionary' necessity is accurate.

6/6) Without empathy our ancestors, every one of them, would have been lion shit hundreds of thousands of years ago. It sucks, I bet, to feel so much at times, but civilisation and our species as a whole depends on Peppers like you. Don't change a thing. Not even a little bit