I never understood myself. I never felt right in my own body, in my own mind. It was as if I was never meant to belong to one being, but rather, to every being. My mind scatters in shades of grey, pivoting back and forth, scurrying, repeating, analyzing, feeling. It has never been good at showing me mercy. I used to resent this; hitting my head in a bookstore because I couldn’t get it to be silent. I would chant, “be still, be still, be still,” when in reality, what I needed was for everyone else to be. The problem didn’t lie in my ability to empathize so deeply with everything, but rather with my ability to feel anything at all. The people, amongst the books, radiated an energy that swelled my whole being. I felt myself: my losses, my joy, my guilt, combined with that of the child’s, and the mother's, and the baristas’, and the man who just left the store.

It is the ability to feel, not just within our own realm, but the realm of others. A greater degree of empathy that disrupts daily life, in which a trip down the road quickly becomes a trip to feel the pulsing hearts of every other living being on this road. An echo of, “I see your pain” and “let me grieve with you,” when all you really wanted was to go to the grocery store.

Imagine it being like a drop of water that starts to feel like a brick when continuously dripped on human skin. This is how it feels. I wanted to stop the drip of emotion; both introspective and extrospective alike. I want to grab people by the shoulders and dig their feet underground, like the root of a plant, and tell them: “Be here! I hear you too closely.”

So how does one take the burden of feeling the world with such intensity and turn it into a blessing? You must turn it from something that distracts you from your life to something that makes you a more productive and genuine human being. The key is in acknowledging and embracing; understanding the fact that you are a person who feels deeply, and that no matter how much you try to change this aspect of yourself, you will never succeed. Your life is built on passion and emotion, and that’s okay. Perhaps it causes you to suffer more than others, but it also makes you kinder and more empathetic. Because having the keen ability to feel for people, and feel for yourself, is not a flaw, it is a virtue.

I understand that it is very easy to internalize and idealize this concept, and that it is very difficult to externalize. To make the effort to get out of your own head takes work. Especially since when you do suffer, it’s so easy for that emotion to become all-encompassing, enough that it takes control of your life, making it difficult to feel any joy at all. But understand this: you are a human being that deserves to be happy. Crazy, right? And in order to obtain that happiness, you must allow yourself to rationalize. To realize that, although there is much that deserves your attention and emotion, it can not be everything. It is all about getting smart with your feelings. It is a about protecting them. It is about only expelling them with things that matter.

Your feelings are sacred. By taking charge of them, you are refusing to let them take charge of you. This produces a level of stillness and peace that allows every other aspect in your life to follow suit.

It sounds a little insane to suggest that in order to feel less, you must feel more. But it isn’t so much about that as it is about putting worth to your emotions; to call the shots and discern what is worth the intensity that you provide.

This is how we heal; this is how we move forward. This is how we can better grasp ourselves, and better grasp our happiness.