Do I Really Want to Know?

For me an obvious example of a character that suffers from the burden of knowing would have to be May. Her big issue is that any sorrow, pain, or hurt in the world, causes her to feel precisely the same way. She cannot help but have that empathy for those around her, something that reaches down to her core. She has to try very hard to stay aloof, to not know about the world around her, because when she does learn of whatever hardships and issues exists, it hits her harder than almost anyone else. In a sense she has a supernatural sense of compassion, one that reaches out to any and everyone. In a sense I am truly impressed by it, and ashamed that I do not have a heart like that, but I also have pity for her, for she is unable to control it. She does not have the ability to separate herself from the problems, to remain apart from them, while still having a heart for them. When something happens, when she learns of that pain, she feels for it without holding back.
As I mentioned, I find that I wish I had that heart for people. So often do we hear of things going on in this world, and we just ignore them. We might think about how sad it is, but really it has no personal meaning to our lives. We notice, accept, and pay attention to these things, at most, but really, it has very little meaning in our own lives. This is something I struggle with so much, and that I desperately wish I could change. I do not want to become like May of course, but at the same time I do, at least the good part of things. I truly wish I actually cared more about the world outside of myself, but I know that this is hard for me. There is so much going on in the world, and yet, while I try to take notice of it sometimes, I find that I rarely worry about it much, or care enough to let it influence me. Even the things I do care about have little affect on me. I realize that we are not meant to try and take on all of the world's problems ourselves, but I just wish that I cared more.
Another way that I personally deal with the burden of knowing is that I struggle more so with not knowing. I am one of those people who likes to be in the loop, I always have to know what is going on, and if I know that there is something I do not know, it drives me crazy. For instance, if someone buys me a present for my birthday, which I dislike from the beginning, and then tell me that they did so but will not tell me what it is, that kills me. I cannot stand not being able to know. Even when I was little, I hated the games like hide and seek or marco polo, because I wanted to know where everyone was. Because of that, I usually would not play, so that I could sit on the side and know what was going on as a whole, where everyone was, and so forth. The problem with this is, sometimes I find out things that I do not want to know. Something will come up in a conversation, and then I bug the person about it until they tell me whatever. More than once I have found that I really did not want to know, just as they had told me, and yet I ignored them. Along the same idea, sometimes I am told secrets, or anything else, that I really did not want to know, and end up becoming almost a burden on me. Such is part of life. We all deal with knowledge that we did not ask for, but comes to us anyways.