Why does everything I say sound so sarcastic

and other questions from a recovering Good Girl

I bought myself a shirt this week, which is news if you understand that shopping for myself drains the soul from my body. But it was a funny shirt, and my love for it was immediate, so I bought it.

It’s funny because it says EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE and I am an empath, so for the most part I am always emotionally available. Putting it on feels like a righteous act of satire.

I wrote a poem awhile ago that goes like this:

the perfect heart
Do not approach
Leave your worries over there.
All this heart knows how to do
is care, care, care

I remember feeling weak for feeling anything, only to reach adulthood and discover I had a shelf full of glass: bottles and bottles full of things I’d been repressing. Eventually, I heard the word “empath” and a few of the bottles cracked open. There’s a word for me? What a gift. Then I discovered more words and collected myself into a little personality profile.

Intuitive absorbent inattentive highly sensitive agreeable empath. Oof. I am sure in the act of Creation, God normally moves around the room for variety. I think, with me, he got tired of walking, and took all of these attributes from the same shelf.

Won’t she be overloaded? They asked him in quality control.

“But look, how fun, all those bottles were the same shape.” He is Giddy.

But she’s going to a place that does not like those bottles.

And then, God invented the cricket.

In the days before I married my husband, I was encouraged to take my (perfect) wedding dress to the cleaners, to steam it. As I was dropping it off I will admit to you with zero exaggerative language: it felt like my torso was on fire. I was hot, something was off. But I said words to myself and left it there anyway. When I got it back the next day, the pleats were bent and torn, the gathers had been pulled out, it was wrinkled to the high heavens: you get it, it was a bit of a wreck. The cleaner had been recommended by our venue concierge, and when I asked her what happened she said oh I’m sorry they usually do our uniforms and they do a good job.

Why am I telling this story?

It's a pretty basic example of the thousands of times I felt that torso-fire and did nothing. I have more stories: times I knew exactly what the moment called for, based on THE FEELING IN THE ROOM (spooky, right), but acted against my empathetic intuition, to keep some version of peace, only for the situation to deteriorate in the way I knew it would if I said nothing. I have stories that make me sound like a clairvoyant, in how accurately I have predicted something happening, based only on the feelings. Oh, the feelings.

Why am I telling these stories?

Perhaps I need the reminder, and I’ll share it with you, too: it is okay to take up space in the capacity you were meant to take up space in, despite constant rhetoric that your space-taking is highly inconvenient, and could you stop now.

That is all.
Be not as you were, but as you are meant to be.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash