Feel It

Sometimes I feel too much.  When it is other people’s happiness that I feel, it is wonderful.  When it is their pain, it is not.  I tend to be one of those weight-of-the-world-on-her-shoulders kinds of girls, and every now and then things get too heavy to hold on my own.  While I would hate to be a person who does not feel anything at all, there are times when things are too much to handle and I just do not feel like feeling it. 

If I find out a friend is pregnant, I cry with joy for the life they are bringing into the world and the love that they will get to experience as a parent.  When someone shares their pride in their child or the promotion they got at work, I am happy right along with them.  Even their smallest happiness can become my own because I want my friends to be happy.  I genuinely share their joy. 

But when I hear that a friend has lost a loved one, even someone I have never met, I cry for their loss.  I have been lucky enough in my life (knock on wood) to have been to very few funerals, but when I have attended final farewells, I am the one who should be folding up paper to shove in the Wailing Wall a la The Secret Life of Bees.  I cry for the life lost, for those who lost them and, if the person was someone I loved, for the hole that will be left in my life. 

Yet, it goes even beyond that.  If a child is missing, I silently pray for them and their parents.  If an ambulance passes me in traffic, I wish with sad hope that the person it is meant for will make it through.  And, God forbid, if a natural disaster should strike, as I imagine the pain of the lost and the families they have left behind…and I feel it. 

Amazingly, when I worked with people who had truly suffered and they told me their stories, I never cried.  Not once.  Their tears poured like an avalanche and I felt it like a boulder on my chest, but I never cried.  I did not cry because I knew that it was my job to be strong for them, no matter what horrific story they shared.  I was somehow able to do that.  But I did cry privately when I knew that it was the last time I would see them, no matter what hell they had put me through on the job. 

I have held friends and family members in my arms whose bodies shook because of their pain, and I offered comfort and love without adding my own tears.  I have done it.  I can block out and cope with things.  Sometimes I am surprised I can cope with all of the feelings.    

At times, I feel too much.

I would rather feel it all than not feel anything at all.