Unseen, unmet, unmatched

What it really means to be a highly sensitive empath

People are scared of depth these days.

If you are a deep person, if you feel deeply, love deeply, are deeply attuned, you likely carry a silent burden: You work twice as hard to be considered half as good (people sense your capability, so they embolden themselves to exercise an imagined right to take from you – without reciprocity), you see people and it lets their nervous systems short-circuit, often leading them to project onto you; and you have probably always carried the silent weight of always being the one who sees, understands, fixes while others coast along on their coping mechanisms.

You however quietly carry a lifetime of being the emotional adult in a world that rewards… well: infants – people who never could – or bothered enough – to emotionally grow. You, by contrast, have heard that you’re "too much", "too sensitive", "too demanding" and, despite everything you carried by yourself with grace, somehow never "tough" enough. The sheer audacity of the lies you have had to endure is… bewildering. And yet, despite being accurate and awake in a world of emotional sleepwalkers, you get labeled as the weird one.

You show up fully but fail to receive what should come naturally, what others get in passing. You get repeatedly misunderstood, un-met and unmatched. And that’s a painful wound to carry. It’s like seeing in full color and constantly being met with people who say seeing in grayscales is the way to live.

And there you and me make a painful mistake: We want to belong, so we believe the lie.

But, despite all this, let me revise my first sentence: Preople are not scared of depth these days, not your depth at least. They are afraid of seeing themselves through you.

You are the mirror, reflecting everything they are not, and it’s their own reflection they can’t bear. If someone acts weirdly in your presence, know that what they are truly reacting to is their own reflection mirrored back at them. But too often, we make their reaction our burden to carry.

You deserve to be mirrored your wholeness back to you, you deserve to see yourself clearly without the distortions others project. You deserve to void the unspoken contracts that others rely on so you carry the emotional labor for things they refuse to own. You deserve to choose you first, even when it hurts. You deserve to release what isn’t yours to carry.

How we highly sensitive empaths move through life is often on the lonelier path, but at least we see it in full color. We taste life, not just manage it, plaster it with external markers of success while these exact markers in reality hollow so many out. We live in strange times really. In times where nothing real - seemingly - gets rewarded anymore. Instead, we encounter a strange mixture of egocentricity and aloofness, emotional laziness and detachment in people to varying degrees these days.

Dear beautiful highly sensitive empaths, you are real in a world that rewards surface. But real is the only way to live fully. Maybe it takes longer until others truly meet us, but at least we have truly met ourselves. And that, in itself, is something many others are struggling to achieve.

Your thoughts?

xo, K