Some of the Heaviest Things I Ever Carried Were Not Even Mine

There is anxiety that does not belong to you that you can pick up so gradually you do not notice you are carrying it. Parents who worried constantly. Households where tension lived in the walls. Environments where you learned early to read the room before you entered it, to scan for danger, to manage your own behaviour around the emotional state of everyone else present.

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That kind of learning is protective when you are a child and have no other options. You develop sensitivity to other people's moods because it keeps you safe, because knowing when the weather is about to change gives you time to prepare.

The problem is you grow up and leave those environments and the sensitivity does not turn off. You are now in completely safe rooms still scanning for danger that is not there. Still managing yourself around moods that are not actually threatening. Still carrying responsibility for emotional atmospheres that were never yours to maintain.

I spent years in relationships, friendships and work environments, feeling responsible for how everyone around me felt. If someone was in a bad mood i would quietly assume it had something to do with me, then spend energy trying to fix something i had probably not caused. If a room felt tense i would feel it as my job to smooth it out. I was an emotional sponge who had never been told i was allowed to be something different.

Untangling what was mine from what i had absorbed from other people was slow and confusing work. Because the absorbed things feel like you. They feel like personality traits, like just the way you are. Not like a set of responses you developed in a specific environment to survive a specific kind of stress.

You do not have to keep carrying what you picked up from other people's lives. Some of it was not yours to begin with. And it has been heavy for long enough.

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