Sometimes the Pain Isn’t Yours

A Note for Empaths

This morning, I woke up feeling low. Really low.

Old haunts and habits reared their ugly heads. And I went down the rabbit holes. Hard. Old patterns, old questions, old pain—all of it came bubbling up. It felt like I hadn’t made any progress at all.

Why, why, why? I asked myself. Everything was fine yesterday. Nothing obvious had changed overnight.

It wasn’t until I was writing an email to a friend later in the day that I paused and thought: Maybe this isn’t my pain.

And just like that, something shifted. My load felt lighter. The heaviness began to lift, like black smoke clearing.

The pain was real. But it wasn’t mine.

Because I was in pain, my mind scrambled for a reason—something logical it could attach to. And I was off to the races, running down old pathways that didn’t lead anywhere and couldn’t resolve what I was feeling.

It took me years to realize I was an empath. Not because the signs weren’t there, but because I had such a specific image in my head of what an empath looked like—something out of a Hollywood séance scene, complete with dramatic gasps and collapsing mediums.

That was my child’s image.