Fragments of Cassandra

For a long time, I was fluent in everyone but myself.

I could feel the temperature of a room change before anyone spoke. I noticed the hesitation behind someone's words, the sadness buried beneath their anger, the small fractures people tried to disguise as indifference.

I called myself an empath.
And perhaps I am.

But somewhere along the way, empathy became an excuse to disappear.
I understood everyone so deeply that I began understanding them 
instead of myself.

When someone hurt me, I searched for the wound that taught them how to hurt.
When someone disappointed me, I imagined the burdens they must have been carrying.
When someone crossed a boundary, I wondered what happened to them that made boundaries difficult to recognize.

There was always an explanation.

And because I could find one, I convinced myself I had no right to be angry.
I confused understanding someone's behavior with having to accept it.

So I became agreeable.
Patient.
Forgiving.

I learned how to read a room before I learned how to read my own heart. I could sense discomfort in another person and rearrange myself before they ever had to ask.

I called it kindness when I betrayed my own boundaries to preserve someone else's comfort.
I called it love when I abandoned my values to keep someone beside me.
I called it strength when something hurt me and I smiled anyway.

Eventually, I became so skilled at carrying everyone else's emotions that I could no longer distinguish their weight from mine.

From the outside, I looked whole.
Inside, nothing matched.

My mouth said yes while something inside me screamed no.
My hands held onto people my heart was exhausted from carrying.

I defended things that wounded me, forgave things I had not healed from, and silenced emotions simply because expressing them might make me difficult to love.

There was always a distance between the woman living my life and the woman living inside me.
And I mistook that distance for peace.

But peace built on self-abandonment is only silence.

Eventually, I started speaking.
Not loudly at first.
Just honestly.

I admitted when something hurt without immediately explaining why the person who hurt me probably didn't mean to.

I allowed myself to say:

"I understand why you did this, and it still hurt me."

Both could be true.

That realization changed something in me.

Empathy did not require absolution.
Compassion did not require access.
Understanding did not require agreement.
And loving someone did not require abandoning myself at their feet.

So I began returning the emotions that were never mine to carry.

I said no without writing an apology afterward. I stopped making myself smaller so other people would never have to confront the size of my feelings. I allowed anger to mean something. Sadness to mean something. Desire to mean something.

I stopped treating my emotions like evidence against my character.

And the strangest thing happened:
I did not become colder.
I became clearer.

I could still understand the wounds beneath someone's cruelty without volunteering to bleed because of them.

I could still recognize someone's humanity without sacrificing my own.
I could sit beside another person's pain without climbing inside it and calling it home.

For the first time, empathy had boundaries.
And within those boundaries, I found myself.

The person inside me began appearing in my words, my choices, my art, my relationships. The things I believed privately became things I was finally willing to live publicly.

Some people understood me less.
But I understood myself more.

And somehow, losing the need to be understood by everyone gave me something far more sacred:

I no longer had to explain myself to the woman in the mirror.

For years, I thought healing meant becoming better; softer in the right places, stronger in the others, easier to love, harder to wound.

Now I think perhaps some healing is much simpler.
Perhaps it is the slow removal of everything we became in order to survive being loved incorrectly.

Until there is no performance left.

No translation.
No distance between the heart and the mouth.

Just one self.

Whole not because she is unbroken, but because every piece of her finally belongs to the same person.

I still feel deeply.
I still notice the tremor beneath someone's voice.
I still search for the story behind the behavior.
I still love with an instinct to understand.

But I no longer disappear inside that understanding.

I can hold compassion for another person in one hand and loyalty to myself in the other.
Perhaps that is what congruence has become for me:

not caring less about everyone else,
but finally including myself among the people I believe deserve my compassion.

My inner world and my outer life have finally met.

I am no longer standing between them, choosing which version of myself deserves to exist.
I have returned to myself.

And this time,
I am not leaving.


Be'ahava,
The Mourning Bird