Do keep calling it empathy; it saves you the effort of having an actual opinion.

The line is for the person who has turned a failure of nerve into a personality. You call it empathy because the alternative is admitting that you have no convictions to defend and no stomach for the argument. Feeling everything is a convenient excuse for saying nothing, and you have become remarkably fluent in the language of sensitivity. You listen, you nod, you say you can see both sides, and then you retire to the moral high ground without having risked a single opinion. It is not kindness. It is cowardice in a soft jumper. The phrase actual opinion is the knife, because it names the thing you have spent years avoiding while polishing your reputation for warmth. Real empathy costs something; it requires you to judge, to choose, to disappoint someone. You have chosen instead to be agreeable and call it virtue. The line lands hardest when you announce that you are an empath in a tone that expects applause, or when you excuse another failure to act by saying you felt too much. You did not feel too much. You felt just enough to avoid the difficult thing and then dressed the retreat as moral superiority. Keep the label if it comforts you; it is the only work you have ever finished.