Day 27 — Being an Emotional Sponge Sucks 🐡

Today I met a new acquaintance for brunch. We bought fresh buns from the local bakery and went to his house. The weather was nice, and he played jazz on the radio while we ate and chatted.

I just wish my internal experience of the encounter had been different—more like how it must have looked from the outside. As the conversation drifted between topics, I felt increasingly dissociated. I slipped into that familiar state where, instead of being present and engaged, I observe myself observing everyone else. It’s a strange feeling.

I often experience other people’s emotions so strongly that I can’t clearly separate them from my own. It all blurs into one big soup. Because I crave tranquility, I end up believing I need to calm everyone else down before I’m allowed to feel calm myself. Of course, that’s impossible.

If I wait for world peace before I can have a calm mind, I’ll never have it.

I wish I could say I’ve found a magic solution, but most of the time I just avoid people who drain me. Is that part of why autistic people are seen as antisocial? We can be so empathic that we drown in the flood of emotions, and then when we distance ourselves to cope, it gets read as coldness.

If I only have a thin membrane between myself and the world, then I need to be intentional about my environments. I need time in my sensory cocoon.

After brunch, I got home and went straight to bed. It was the middle of the day, but I felt completely off. I was angry—at myself and at everyone else. It had been such a light social interaction, and still I felt unable to cope.

The first hour I spent in bed with my heating pad, an audiobook, and an eye mask. Even afterwards, I still felt shaken. I tried to move on to uni work, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something must be wrong with me for being this sensitive.

But honestly, I think society makes life harder for sensitive people by constantly telling us to toughen up. Research on highly sensitive people suggests that these traits are not chosen—they’re innate. Telling someone to grow thicker skin is about as effective as telling a tall person to be shorter.

I can understand all of this intellectually. I can even recognise the strengths of my empathy. And yet, on days like today, I wish I could switch it off.

I just want to move through life the way some of my friends seem to—without shrinking away from the sun like a vampire, without drowning in other people’s unprocessed emotions, without jumping at every unexpected sound.

But like everyone else, I can’t step out of my own skin. So it doesn’t help to lose myself in comparisons to other people’s toughness.

Is there something about you, too, that you sometimes wish you could leave behind?

I hope you are well, wherever you are.
Celine