Before I could explain what I felt
I was already feeling everything.
I was born with a disability that made communication very difficult. As a young child, I couldn’t talk much.
Before I had the words to explain what was happening inside me, I learned to understand the world in other ways.
Through facial expressions. Changes in someone’s voice. The feeling in a room. Everything people communicated without saying a word.
Sensitivity became one of my first languages.
I was also adopted. The woman who adopted me was my mother in every way that mattered - and I lost her when I was nine years old.
She was my protector. When she died, I was left with a father who was unpredictable, and my life changed completely.
I entered foster care and experienced instability, disconnection, and periods of homelessness while I was still very young. It was also during this time that I struggled with addiction - not because I was weak or broken, but because I was trying to survive pain I didn’t yet have words for.
When safety is uncertain, you learn to anticipate. You become adaptable. You notice the smallest shifts because noticing helps you understand what might happen next.
My natural sensitivity was still there. But now, hypervigilance had wrapped itself around it.
For years, I didn’t know there was a difference.
“My heart was open. But so were my wounds.”
I became everything for everyone
From the outside, I looked capable.
That sensitivity followed me into adulthood.
I became a young single mother. I worked, raised my children, cared for people, and built a life while carrying wounds I didn’t yet understand.
I loved people deeply. I could see who they were underneath their pain, anger, addiction, and chaos.
And because I could see underneath it, I often stayed longer than I should have.
I confused understanding someone with being responsible for them. I believed loving someone meant holding space for their potential - even when the relationship was hurting me.
Inside, I had become a stranger to myself.
I could sense what everyone around me needed, but struggled to hear my own intuition once someone disagreed with it. I offered compassion endlessly, while using that same compassion to explain away the ways I was being hurt.
And for a long time, I couldn’t tell the difference between an open heart and an open wound.
The collapse
Eventually, the version of me that could survive everything could no longer carry me.
There were painful relationships, financial loss, bankruptcy, and a depression that lasted nearly two years.
At the time, I thought I was falling apart. Looking back, I can see that something more honest was trying to emerge.
My awakening didn’t arrive as one perfect spiritual moment. It happened gradually.
Through meditation. Energy work and Reiki. Learning to listen to my body. Intuitive and spiritual experiences I could no longer dismiss.
And through the slow realization that healing wasn’t about becoming a better version of the person everyone else needed.
It was about returning to the person I had abandoned.
The realization
My sensitivity was never the problem.
I began to understand that empathy and hypervigilance can feel almost identical inside the body.
Intuition can become tangled with fear. Compassion can become entangled with responsibility. An open heart can become an open wound.
The answer was not to become less sensitive. It was to become rooted enough to remain myself while I felt.
To love without carrying. To see another person’s pain without making it my responsibility to heal. To trust what I knew without needing everyone else to agree.
To stay open without disappearing.