Never reveal yourself.

Unless you want unnecessary conflict and to be left alone... which I'm assuming you do. Maybe revealing yourself to another is like a simple process of elimination. If the person you confess to is a fellow traveller, then you will have made a real friend for the first time in your life. If not, they'll try to walk away. If you let them go, then it will be better for them in the long run, I think.

For me though, I have a tendency to see people as pawns in a game I play to amuse myself. I try to learn all of the different ways that emotion can be activated, and learn key phrases that control each person. Therefore, by the time someone has gotten close enough to me to find out about me, I have enough knowledge of their workings that I can easily manipulate them. I make them stay around, not because I care deeply about them, but because of the amount of work it would take to replace them.

Death.

If you're one of them, you'll be familiar with the feelings that are associated with the death of a loved one. Even if you've never felt it yourself, when someone tells you that their son or daughter, their closest firend maybe... has died, you know. You can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voice, see it in their gait, feel thier emotions seeping from every pore of their body, I'm assuming, because I can. The difference is, I assume, that when you see things like this, you feel what they feel, where I simply feel uncomfortable.

Maybe uncomfortable isn't the exact word choice I was looking for. The thing is, faking it is pretty easy in situations you've been in a million times. Presented with a novel situation such as that, with no reference point to work from, all that I can do is go quiet and put on the same "sympathy" face that I would use when someone says that they had a bad day. How do you correctly adjust the magnitude of emotion to display?