I live in this world where I blame myself for everything. My happiness is dependent on the happiness of others. I cause others’ misery. If they are unhappy or upset, it is my own doing. It’s a control thing, I know. If I am responsible for the world, then I can control whether or not everything is okay. If I’m not responsible for the world, I have to just sit back and let things happen. Let others be upset, let people suffer, without being able to fix it. If I’m responsible for everyone’s well-being, then I don’t have to accept that life can just happen and people can suffer or be upset or have bad things happen to them. If I’m responsible for everyone, then although it all gets put on me, and it all becomes my fault for not being perfect, or a good enough ______ (daughter, girlfriend, friend, sister, fill in the blank), at least then I can pretend that there is a rhyme and reason to things, that if I make myself perfect than everything will be okay, that if I do everything right, I don’t have to sit with the pain of others and feel helpless.
Author
Jen
Speech-Language Pathologist. Nature-loving, book-reading, coffee-drinking, mismatched-socks-wearing, Autism-Awesomeness-finder, sensitive-soul Bostonian.
This is me, the summation of my sensitivity struggles
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” – Andrew Boyd
Full
Today was so beautiful, so crisp and fresh and colorful and blue and bright and it was so beautiful that it filled me up but it kept filling and filling and it filled me too much and it made me sad.
I hate when that happens.
So deep….
Social situations are hard, not because I have social anxiety, social communication issues, or any of the like; they are hard because more often than not, most people are very surface-level. And that’s not their fault, it’s not a bad thing, it’s just the way a lot of the world is. But I’m like….a million times deeper. When they stay on the physical plane, my mental body and supraintellectual body and all of the others are screaming for input and stimulation. It’s like, the conversation satisfies one finger on one hand. But what about the rest of my body?
Embracing Our Darkness
Love this article. Thoughts?
This. Is. Me.
“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
- John Green
Powerful to negligible
Sometimes I feel really powerful and important and that I can make a difference and affect the world.
And sometimes I look up at the sky and realize I’m a tiny, negligible human being in the vast expanse of this universe.
And that’s a panicky feeling.