A journey through the whole of what it means to feel.
I don't want to merely pass through this life. I want to be moved by it, astonished by it, and feel it fully.
Sometimes I think some of us carry entire universes inside us, and the hardest part is finding somewhere safe enough to let them unfold. I notice this about myself whenever something touches me deeply. A scene in a film, a line someone says without thinking, a song arriving at the wrong moment, a story about a life I have never lived and suddenly, I am not simply watching anymore. My heart goes there. Fully. It doesn't know how to stand at a distance and observe. It enters the room, sits beside the grief, feels the jealousy, understands the silence, follows the happiness, and somehow carries a little of every heart it meets.
Sometimes I wonder if everyone feels this way, or if some people have simply learned how to leave certain things at the door. I watch someone finish a series and move on from a character's heartbreak as if it is only a story. Meanwhile, I am still somewhere inside it, thinking about the person who was left behind, the person who couldn't say what they felt, the quiet ache behind someone's anger. I feel the main character's joy and the other person's loss at the same time. It can become a strange little rollercoaster inside me, too many emotions arriving together, asking to be noticed. And honestly, sometimes it is exhausting. There are days when I wish I could feel a little less, just enough to make everything quieter.
But lately, I am beginning to see another side of it. Yes, the another most beautiful side that exists and make it more alive.
I want to believe that the world is a place where we can be astonished.
I don't always know what to do with how deeply I feel. Sometimes love feels too large for the body that carries it. Grief does too. Even happiness can arrive with such fullness that I don't know where to put my hands. There are days when every little thing seems to touch something much older inside me, and suddenly I am not only feeling what is happening now, but everything that has ever asked to be felt.
Because feeling deeply is not something I need to apologise for. This intensity is also a way of being present in the world. To notice what others overlook. To let a story reach somewhere real inside me. To be moved by a stranger's grief, to feel joy in something as small as sunlight finding the floor, to care about the invisible things people carry beneath ordinary conversations. There is something quietly miraculous about having a heart that doesn't always know how to look away.
I am not learning to feel less, I am learning to love the heart that feels this much.
And perhaps this is the part I want to keep learning, I don't have to turn every feeling into a wound. I can let it pass through me without becoming it. I can make room for grief without living inside it. I can feel love without needing to hold it forever. I can let happiness be enormous when it arrives. I can allow myself to be moved, shaken, softened, and still return to myself afterwards. Because what a privilege it is to feel this intensely.
To have a heart that still responds. To still be moved by stories. To still care enough for someone else's happiness to make your own heart lighter.
So I am trying not to hate how deeply I feel anymore.
I am learning to feel the joy.
Feel the grief. Feel the love. Feel the ache. Feel the hope. Feel all of it.
That is what happens when we keep an entire universe of emotions inside ourselves. We learn to carry planets quietly. We give our grief a small room, place our love beside the window, fold our longing into the corners, and continue with the day as if nothing is moving inside us. But sometimes the door opens, even just a little, and everything rushes out at once. Not because we are broken, but because even the universe needs somewhere to expand.
Because not every emotion needs to be understood immediately. Some only need to be witnessed. Some need a little time. Some simply need to move through us like weather before the sky remembers itself.
And maybe the thing I spend so much time trying to soften about myself, the sensitivity, the tenderness, the way my heart goes all the way in is never my weakness at all.
It is the most beautiful thing about me. It is what keeps me human.
And for those of us who feel a little too deeply sometimes, perhaps there is nothing to quiet or correct or to fix. We only need to stop fighting the tenderness in us and let it exist, fully and honestly. Because one day, we may realise that the thing we spent years trying to hide was never our weakness at all. It truly was the absolutely most beautiful thing about you.
Perhaps heart is not too much because it feels deeply, it is simply alive enough ti feel the whole world.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement.— Mary Oliver ( When Death Comes)