Sensitivity Is a Bloodsport
“I’m tired, Boss… Mostly, I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day.”
— John Coffey, The Green Mile
Being an empath in this world feels like a slow kind of dying. Like you’re bleeding internally from wounds that never belonged to you, but still somehow live inside your body like they were born there. Like John Coffey from The Green Mile, taking in all the sickness, all the horror, all the cruelty... breathing it into your chest and holding it there until it either breaks you or eats you alive. But there's no magic trick to spit it back out, no glowing light, no miraculous release. Just weight. Just sorrow. Just the impossible ache of carrying what was never yours to carry, but what your heart won’t let you ignore.
Lately, I feel like I’m drowning in other people’s pain. It’s everywhere. It’s in the video of George Floyd crying out for his mama with the kind of primal, holy terror that shoots like an arrow straight through your spine and into your soul. It’s in the way the world watched him die and how some people still looked for a justification, as if he wasn’t a human above anything else. It’s in the screaming, in the marching, in the silence of people who should be screaming, too. It’s in every "I can’t breathe" that echoes louder than any bullet or tear gas canister. It’s in the eyes of Black mothers afraid to let their children walk to the store. It’s in the cracked voices of men and women who’ve been shouting their humanity into deaf ears for generations. It’s in the hashtags. Another name. Another story. Another death. Another time I feel the air sucked out of the room and replaced with something that scorches the lungs. And I feel all of it. All the time.
And then there’s the pandemic… COVID, fear, loss, the funerals on Zoom, the ventilators, the people dying alone. The isolation, the paranoia, the rage at a world that refuses to slow down long enough to save the most vulnerable. It’s like the world is on fire and I’m standing in the center of it, watching the flames eat everything good, and there’s nothing I can do but feel it burn.
I don’t know how to explain what it’s like to live with your nervous system stretched so thin you can feel the sorrow of strangers like a blade across your skin. I don’t know how to explain what it’s like to live in a body that feels like an exposed nerve. To have a nervous system so tattered and frayed that other people’s grief slices through you like glass. Not metaphorically… literally. Like pain doesn’t just brush past you, it enters you. It roots itself in your gut and curls around your spine. I don’t know how to describe the kind of hyper-awareness that turns every news scroll into a minefield. I don’t know how to explain what it means to hold your breath every time you scroll social media, because one more tragedy might be the thing that finally makes your body collapse under the weight. One more death. One more video. One more scream that echoes too close to your own unhealed ones. It doesn’t feel like watching, it feels like absorbing. Like inheriting the ache of people you’ve never met. Like my body doesn’t understand the difference between mine and theirs anymore.
People think being an empath means you’re gentle and enlightened, like it’s some beautiful spiritual gift. But sometimes it’s a curse. It means I’m raw, always. Wide open. It means I walk through this world emotionally skinless. Overexposed. Cracked open with no idea how to sew myself shut again. It means I get pierced by things most people don’t even notice. It means I carry stories that were never mine, but now live inside me like ghosts I can't exorcise.
Sometimes it means I shut down… not because I don’t care, but because I’ve absorbed too much, because I can’t take one more damn thing. My emotional hard drive becomes full. My system short-circuits. My spirit glitches. My heart starts short-circuiting under the static of too much humanity. My emotional hard drive is full, and there’s no more room, and so I go quiet. I disappear. I ghost the world. Not because I’m numb, but because I feel everything. Because I’m saturated. Because I’ve taken in so much hurt that there’s no place left in me that feels like home. Because if one more drop of pain touches my skin, I might break into pieces I won’t be able to gather back together.
People call it sensitivity like it’s a weakness. Like it’s softness. Sweetness. A gentle heart. But they don’t see the bleeding. They don’t see the cost. They don’t understand that sensitivity isn’t cute, it’s carnage. It’s a quiet kind of suffering that lives behind your smile, behind your eyes, behind the forced laughter you use to keep people comfortable. They don’t understand the quiet grief that sits behind your eyes when you carry the sadness of the world in your bones. They don’t know what it’s like to feel like a sponge that never wrings out. It’s the kind of grief that never fully leaves your body, because the world never stops offering more of it. I wake up already carrying ten different people’s pain like it's mine. Strangers. Friends. The collective ache of the whole planet. It moves through me… thick, choking, impossible to breathe around. What it’s like to see someone hurting and not be able to walk away without that pain becoming part of you. I don’t know how to remain human, how to feel it and still be able to walk away without that pain becoming part of the landscape of my heart forever.
I don’t think people realize how violent it feels, to absorb everything like that. To have no filter, no armor, no off switch. To walk into a room and feel the tension like a fist in your gut. To scroll your phone and feel your soul splinter. To cry over people you’ve never met, to carry their suffering in your body like it belongs there. I beg the universe to make me colder. Numb me. Harden me. Just enough to get through the day without breaking open in front of everyone. Because this isn’t poetic. This isn’t beautiful. This is a soul that bruises on contact. This is a body that wasn’t built for this kind of weight. This is exhaustion that no sleep can fix.
Even knowing what this does to me, to my soul, I still can’t look away. I can’t not care. I see someone hurting and something in me splits. Their pain becomes mine. It enters me like a possession. I can’t turn it off. I don’t want to turn it off, but sometimes I wish I could. Because living this way… loving this way hurts. All the time.
I’m tired, Boss. I mean soul level tired. I mean tired in a way that sinks into your marrow and stays there. Tired in the way John Coffey meant it… tired of all the ugliness, all the cruelty, all the senseless pain. Tired of feeling it all, hearing it all, carrying it all when no one asked me to, but my body doesn’t know how not to. I’m tired of watching people tear each other apart and call it justice. Tired of pretending I’m fine when I’m crumbling inside. Tired of smiling so I don’t make other people uncomfortable while I’m silently screaming into the corners of my own chest.
I’m tired of being the one who always feels, when most people are just trying to numb or don’t even care since it’s not affecting them. Tired of being told I’m “too much,” when the truth is I’ve had to become too much just to survive this world without disappearing completely. I’m tired of feeling like a burden for simply reacting to the unbearable weight of being alive right now. Tired of the way this world forces us to keep walking with broken feet, keep loving with shattered hearts, keep showing up like our spirits aren’t screaming.
And I don’t have a clever ending. I don’t have a metaphor to make this easier to digest or prettier to read. I’m not interested in palatability right now. I just needed to write it. To rip it out of my chest before it calcifies into something toxic. I needed to bleed it out in words so it doesn’t rot me from the inside. Because if I don’t let it out, I don’t know what it will turn me into.
Author’s Note:
Originally Written: June 1, 2020 - living with a body made of nerve endings in a world built of blades
I wrote this when the world was literally on fire… when we were all watching George Floyd beg for breath and somehow still arguing about whether or not his life mattered because of his background, as if being human alone didn’t award him respect. The pandemic had us isolated, scared, and already breaking. I didn’t just witness what was happening in the world, I inhaled it. Every scream, every silence, every ache… it lived inside me, it still does. The world hasn’t softened. The ugliness hasn’t stopped. There’s a desperate ache in carrying the weight of so many wounds that aren’t yours but root themselves in your bones anyway. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that feeling of being utterly exposed to the world’s cruelty and pain. Like I’m standing there, heart wide open, trying to hold it all together while the wounds keep reopening around me.
Somehow, hate still courses like poison through the veins of this world. I don’t even know how to name the kind of grief that wasn’t meant for you but sneaks inside anyway and makes its home there, carving you out from the inside. The same gut-crushing ache that I thought had finally started to heal has risen again, heavier and sharper than ever.
The world is in chaos again. The No King’s protest tore open all those old wounds I thought had finally started to close. But they’re wide open, raw, bleeding still. This week, I carry the same soul-crushing weight I did in 2020, the same grief that drags my breath out of me, the same rage that twists my gut, the same unbearable tenderness that comes with walking around completely exposed, heart ripped open and unguarded.
It destroys me how easy it is for some to watch children ripped from their families, pulled from classrooms, shoved into cages, treated like they don’t belong here because they don’t have a set of papers… like their very existence is a question up for debate. Family members, friends, they’re all loud with hatred. They cheer it on, call it justice, call it law and order, as if tearing children away from safety and love is somehow righteous.
People don’t even bother hiding it anymore, the way their hearts have twisted tight with hate and anger, sharp and ugly as broken glass. They don’t see these children as human beings with hearts that ache, with parents who scream silently in the dark. They see only the absence of documents, and from that absence, they build walls of cruelty… walls made of cold indifference and burning hate. As if their right to live, to be safe, to be loved, depends on a signature, a stamp, a box checked on some cold, indifferent form. It’s disgusting. It’s unbearable. And the worst part is how normal it’s all become, how casually this violence is disguised as policy and called justice. How easily compassion is drowned out by the loudest voices yelling for more cages, more separation, more pain.
I’m not here to debate politics. That’s not the point. It never should be. This isn’t about red or blue, left or right. It isn’t about parties or ideologies. It’s about the raw, naked bones of what it means to be human. It’s about morals stripped down to their barest truth. About the very thing that separates humans from animals… not intelligence, not dominance, not language, but empathy. About human decency… something so simple, so sacred, it should never have to be begged for or fought over. A right that should be laced into our very first breath, gifted at birth without condition or question. So many people have lost the ability to recognize pain that isn’t their own and still be moved to act. To love beyond borders, to protect the vulnerable, to say enough when we see injustice… that’s what makes us human. And when we lose that, we lose everything.
How did we become so comfortable turning people into headlines and hashtags, into problems to be solved instead of hearts to be held? How did we forget that every single one of us began as someone’s baby? That behind every border, every badge, every statistic, there is a human being who just wants to live, to love, to be free from fear? I don’t know how we lost the thread. But we did. And now we treat compassion like it’s weakness. We call cruelty “justice.” We look at suffering and call it patriotism. We turn our eyes away and somehow still sleep soundly while others scream into pillows and detention center walls.
This is what it feels like to love humanity and still be haunted by it. To carry hope in one hand and grief in the other, and never quite know which one is heavier. To keep believing people can be better, even as they keep proving how far we’ve fallen. To walk through the world with your heart cracked wide open, absorbing pain that isn’t yours, love that isn’t returned, and still you offer love freely anyway. You ache anyway. You show up anyway. Because the moment you stop feeling… that’s when you stop being human.
And I’m not ready to give that up. Not yet.
