Crow and Flame

I am an empath.

I feel things to my core.

Not just my own emotions—everyone else’s too.

The tension in a room.

The sadness behind someone’s smile.

The heaviness people carry but never speak aloud.

I can feel it all, like it’s pressed into my skin.

And for a long time, I thought that made me strong.

I thought it made me good.

But what no one really tells you about being an empath is that the gift can become a curse when you don’t know how to protect yourself.

Because feeling deeply isn’t just emotional.

It’s physical.

It’s mental.

It’s exhausting.

It’s carrying grief that doesn’t belong to you.

It’s crying over pain that isn’t even yours.

It’s feeling someone else’s anger and thinking you did something wrong.

It’s absorbing their trauma like your body is some kind of sponge.

And eventually… it becomes too much.

Not because you’re weak.

But because you were never meant to hold the whole world inside your chest.

So I started doing what sensitive people eventually learn to do when the world keeps cutting into them:

I built walls.

I stopped letting people in.

I stopped feeling.

At first it felt like relief.

Like silence after years of noise.

Like peace.

But it wasn’t peace.

It was numbness.

I became emotionless. Robotic.

Not because I didn’t care… but because I cared too much for too long.

I shut down the whole system.

Because when you feel everything, the only way to survive sometimes is to stop feeling anything at all.

And that’s the part no one understands.

People assume numbness means you’re cold.

But numbness isn’t coldness.

It’s protection.

It’s your nervous system screaming:

“If we keep feeling this much, we won’t make it.”

So you go quiet.

You go blank.

You go distant.

You stop reacting.

You stop trusting.

You stop crying.

You stop hoping.

And the world looks at you and thinks you’re fine because you’re not falling apart anymore.

But you are.

You’re just falling apart privately.

Because the truth is… walls don’t only keep pain out.

They keep everything out.

Joy.

Connection.

Love.

Laughter.

Softness.

Safety.

They keep out the things you were always meant to feel, too.

And that’s when you realize something terrifying:

You may be protected…

But you’re not alive.

The real healing isn’t becoming numb forever.

And it isn’t going back to being wide open and bleeding out for everyone.

Healing is learning how to be soft without being destroyed.

Healing is learning boundaries that don’t harden you.

Healing is realizing you can be sensitive and still be strong.

Because being an empath doesn’t mean you were born to suffer.

It means you were born to feel.

But you were never meant to carry everyone else.

You were never meant to drown in what isn’t yours.

You weren’t meant to become robotic.

You were meant to be real.

And maybe the bravest thing you can do isn’t building walls…

Maybe it’s learning how to open the gate again.

Just enough to let the light in.