The Girl Who Always Wore Someone Else's Shoes

On feeling everything — and forgetting to feel for yourself.

Source : https://www.runnersneed.com/

Hi. I don't really know how to start this without it sounding like a therapy session, so I'll just say it — I feel things. A lot. Too much, maybe. Not just my own things, but yours too. There's something nobody really tells you about feeling things deeply — that it's exhausting. Not in the dramatic, poetic way. In the quiet, Tuesday-afternoon kind of way, where you're just sitting with your chai going cold and you're still replaying a look someone gave you three days ago, wondering what it meant, what you did, what they felt.

I'm what people call a hypersensitive empath. And before you roll your eyes — I know, I know — hear me out. It's not a personality aesthetic. It's not a mood board. It's waking up exhausted from conversations that haven't happened yet. It's replaying someone else's words on loop at 2am wondering if you said something wrong. It's feeling responsible for the emotional temperature of every room you walk into. A stranger's grief in a crowd can sit in my chest for hours. Someone's offhand comment finds a home in my head rent-free for weeks. People call it being "too sensitive" like it's a character flaw, a loose wire that needs fixing.

That's me. That's been me for as long as I can remember.

And the wild part — the part that took me embarrassingly long to notice — is that I got so good at fitting into other people's shoes that I completely forgot my own were sitting there. Worn out. Waiting.

"I got so good at fitting into other people's shoes that I completely forgot my own were sitting there. Worn out. Waiting."

Here's a thing I do. When something hurts me — when someone does something that cuts deep — I go quiet. I don't blow up, I don't call, I don't text a paragraph at 2am. I disappear into myself. I process it alone, in the dark corners of my own mind, turning it over until every sharp edge has been smoothed out. And then I come back. Smile on. Like nothing happened. For a long time, I thought this made me the bigger person. Mature, even.

But what I was actually doing was swallowing something that deserved to be said. I was protecting someone else from my reaction at the cost of never letting myself have one. Teaching myself that my emotions were only acceptable once they'd been made small enough to not inconvenience anyone. That I had to earn the right to feel things — by tidying them up first.

"My emotions were only acceptable once they'd been made small enough to not inconvenience anyone."

Here's the pattern, and maybe you'll recognize it. Someone hurts me. My first instinct isn't anger — it's empathy. I immediately start building their case for them. Maybe they're going through something. Maybe I misread it. Maybe I was being too sensitive. I slip into their shoes so fast, so automatically, that I forget I walked in wearing my own. And still — I keep offering them up.

There's a version of empathy that's a gift. The kind that makes you a safe person, a good friend, someone who truly sees people. I think I have that, and I'm proud of it. But there's another version that becomes armor — the kind where you understand everyone's pain so thoroughly that you don't leave any room to acknowledge your own. Where you're so busy asking why did they do that that you never stop to ask how did that make me feel? That version I've been quietly, painfully, unlearning.

Because the thing about empaths is that we're often praised for our sensitivity when it's pointed outward. When we make others feel seen and held and understood. But the same sensitivity pointed inward? Suddenly it becomes "too much." So we learn. We adapt. We edit ourselves — we show the world the version that's already processed, already calm, already okay. And we tuck the rest away somewhere deep, hoping it dissolves on its own.

It doesn't dissolve. It just waits.

I'm writing this not because I have it figured out. I'm writing this because I think there are more of us than we realize — people who feel so much that we've learned to perform feeling nothing. People who've become fluent in understanding others and completely illiterate in understanding ourselves. People who keep asking am I too much? when the real question might be: why do I keep making myself less?

So this is me, standing here, in my own worn-out shoes. Looking down at them and thinking — these need some love too. Not later. Not once I've sorted through everyone else's feelings. Now.

I'm still learning this. Some days I do okay. Some days I'm still mid-disappearing-act before I even catch myself. But I'm catching it more. I'm sitting with the discomfort of my own emotions instead of immediately intellectualizing them into nothing. I'm asking myself, what do I need right now? — and that question still feels a little foreign in my mouth, honestly. Like a word I learned late. But I'm saying it. Slowly. Imperfectly.

And that's something.

If any part of this felt familiar — if you've ever found yourself so deep in someone else's perspective that you lost your own — I just want you to know: you're not too sensitive. You're not too much. You've just been practicing love in a direction that needs to include yourself too. Your feelings are not inconveniences. They're information. They're yours. And they deserve to be felt, not managed.

Your shoes matter too. Even the worn-out ones. Maybe especially those.

Start there. The rest can wait.

"I am learning that feeling deeply is not my flaw. It is my language. I just need to speak it for myself too."

— Shambhavi · Life's Fine Print  

            

Source : Pinterest (Alice in the Wonderland)