| t h e • e m p a t h | Square peg in a round hole

I often wonder, how much of what weighs me down is not really mine to carry?

You see, I am a frail human being with a tendency to be soaked in other peoples emotions. Engulfed in a perpetual high dose of sensibility that is at times, exhausting.

As a child, I vividly remember having trouble being myself, mostly because I was always walking in other people’s shoes. My eyes only saw the world from their perspective and I humbly accepted them as they were.

I could not let go of their thoughts, opinions, and just like another layer of skin, I would carry their problems with me. I did not create my fantasy world, like most of the children, I was living in the raw and rough world that that was unfolding right before my eyes, in post-communist Romania.

One evening, my grandpa took me by his hand and as we walked in the nearby park, I knew that he somehow understood my troubled personality.
He asked me to look up in the sky and to search deep inside my mind and heart and to tell him if I remember me being there up in the sky, with the galaxies and the moon.
He then told me I am a celestial child, a twinkle made out of stardust and kindness and that I came here to this world to make my parents and everybody around me happy. But in order to do that, I have to learn how to protect myself.

By now, my emotions are all stifled. I rearrange them until I get a sense of comfort. But there are energies, draining me incessantly, repeatedly. They jerk me around, and just like harmless ghosts, they twist and turn my body as I am still unable to grab the wheel and steer clear away.

I should shed everything I am and rebuild myself brick by brick, out of parts of me.

Someday...