the blessing and curse of feeling deeply

for those who laugh the loudest and cry the hardest.

I’ve always been a person who’s so full of energy, and who feels so deeply. Call it being an empath or an altruist, but I have just always felt everything with intensity. I didn’t just sympathize with people, but I deeply empathized. I would see a girl crying for something, and I was crying with her, feeling her pain and sorrow deep in my bones. I would see a group of birds that would hop away once another would try to get close, and my heart would hurt. I cry when gifted a piece of paper, and when someone every once in a while says “Hey I thought of you…”. Being, as I’ve been called recently, a “chalant” person, life has been full of emotion and of color. But I don’t think I fully grasped the concept and philosophy, if you will, of being someone who feels deeply until these last few months. I experienced epiphany after epiphany, breakdown after breakdown. Falling in love, and heartbreak. Heartbreak within myself, and falling in love with myself. How what I felt was a curse, became what I think is now the most beautiful part of myself.

Starting with the aspect of love, I have never been a nonchalant person—Limerence? I experience it to the fullest. I love with such intensity, but my heart also shatters with that same intensity. My word of the year has been Yearn. In our generation’s vocabulary, it’s become so normalized—“I want a yearner,” “I literally yearn for this guy,” and so on. As I gravitated toward this word, which I felt matched the intensity of my emotions, I decided to take a month or so to truly dedicate myself to understanding its depth and the weight it carries compared to mere desire. In my journey, I gathered this: Desire is based on an object that you want—an endgame, if you will—whereas yearning is a softer, yet deeper and more spiritual want. It is the act of going after and aching for something you may never attain, something that may never fully fill your cup. I don’t desire love; I yearn for it. I often compare myself in love to a pomegranate—I want to give myself fully, to be ripped open, explored, and consumed with hunger down to the last aril. I want my lover’s hands and mouth to be stained with me, and I want the same from them. I want to explore the depths of their soul and have the light of my love reach the deepest and darkest parts of their mind. There’s that intensity I was talking about, by the way. In this same journey however, I also learned this: A person who is vulnerable and feels with every fiber of their soul is the strongest type of person to exist because, despite the constant risk of pain and betrayal, they choose to continue and to feel with intensity and softness. Not soft as in weak, but soft as in not hardened by the cruelties and abuses that this cold world freely offers up. But the world does not reward softness—it more often than not punishes it.

“Being an emotionally intelligent person means you can never fully hate someone who has hurt you, because you always try to understand why this person is the way they are.” - unknown

To feel deeply is both a blessing and a curse, but I have often felt the weight of the latter. There is a cruelty in being open-hearted, in carrying emotions so raw and unfiltered that they threaten to consume you. The world does not meet tenderness with tenderness; instead, it sees vulnerability as an invitation to harm. And yet, despite it all, I have never learned how to build walls. I have only learned to yearn, to keep feeling even when it hurts. The pain of being hurt is the worst I have ever known. It’s a deep wound, one so sharp and painful that you can hear the voices in your head arguing “you should’ve listened to those who told you to not give everything you had”, “no you loved and experienced emotion and that makes it worth it”, “no it doesn’t because at the end of the day you’re the one with a bleeding heart”. It’s as if a piece of my youthful innocence, the part that believed in love at first sight and a happily ever after, was chipped away... Like I will never be loved with the strength that I deserve to be loved, or maybe that I just don’t deserve to be loved that way. It makes me feel as though I’m only here to love, but never to be loved in return. That it’s my fault for loving so deeply, and that no one is obligated to love me, let alone yearn for me. In full honesty, I’m still working out how I feel about it. I believe that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved, but do I really? Is that a philosophy that I’ve convinced myself of so that I can believe I didn’t get destroyed for nothing? I don’t know, but at the end of the day, 1) who truly knows? And 2) despite it all, I still continue to love with every fiber in my body despite all the pain I've felt, so I must live by it to some degree.

I’ve been blabbering for long enough, but that’s my view right now, this is the work I’ve done with myself, what my mind has been full of. There’s no resolution, and no how-to, because none of us know how to deal with this; it’s only our first time at life, and we’re playing with the cards we’ve been dealt. This card of hearts though, I wouldn’t trade for the world. What an honor it is to feel everything that I am entitled to feel; to experience heartbreak, limerence, yearning, excitement, sadness, and everything that makes me a human. I feel in such beautiful colors, and in such beautiful tastes, and although the taste is sometimes bitter and lingers in my mouth for a bit, it always does one of two things: It either fades with time and I learn to avoid and move on, or it becomes outweighed by a sweetness that I wouldn’t’ve fully cherished if it weren’t for the bitterness.

“If I started out as this celestial being, this just energy, and the universe or God or whomever said, ‘Hey, do you want to go to earth for an incredibly short amount of time, like a blip, and experience every emotion that you could possibly feel as a human, you get to have all of these experiences — love, heartache, anxiety, joy, euphoria, whatever, all of it. Do you wanna do that?’ Yeah, I do." - Lili Reinhart