Spoken and unspoken, people are radiating heartbreak. Therefore, I am drowning in heartbreak. The joys come and go, but they’re always shrouded by a veil of grief that never completely lifts. Even when laughter rings, even when the day is bright, I feel it, the heaviness, the ache, the quiet suffering humming beneath it all.

Being the one who feels it all isn’t a humble brag. None of us 'feelers' are walking around shouting, “Hey! I can tell you’re deep in despair right now, how cool is that?” No. We’re walking around with the weight of your world piled atop the weight of our own. We’re carrying things no one handed us but that we absorbed anyway, because that’s what feelers do. We can’t not. It's like the world's most traumatizing superpower. Like that character on Heroes, the blond girl whose other personality comes out in bursts of chaos. Sure, it looks like power, like strength, but it’s also brutal to be constantly jolted from one extreme to the other. You’re not only carrying it, you’re trying to protect the people around you from the gravity of it, holding yourself together so the innocent bystanders in your orbit don’t get pulled under along with you.

Often, we spend our downtime filling our ears and eyes with fiction, with TV, with podcasts, with anything that’s not reality. Because at least it’s fiction. And fiction can be more easily brushed off than the realities we’re attuned to. A tragic ending in a drama doesn’t wound as deeply as the quiet look in a neighbor’s eye, or the slight quiver in someone’s voice when they say they’re fine.

"It takes tremendous fortitude to carry on when you can see what others cannot..." - Raymond Reddington (Blacklist)

The tension in the air is palpable right now. Heavy. Almost unbearable. The grief saturating the atmosphere is so heavy it’s hard to verbalize, like breathing underwater.

And here we are, the thinkers and feelers (and pretty much everyone in some way), this week, this decade, carrying more than we can comprehend. Our minds nearly always forty steps ahead, mapping outcomes before anyone else has even noticed there’s something to map. Feeling what everyone else is just now beginning to put into words. We’re living in 2040-anxiety mode, hearts already worn raw from anticipating storms no one else has named yet.

We fight to stay here, in the present, because we’ve been told that’s where peace lives. But here and now doesn’t offer much comfort when here and now feels like collapse.

I’m tired. I’m weak. And I’m crying over things that most people scroll past without noticing. A video of a Chick-fil-A employee being promoted — I feel the joy bursting from the screen, the hope of a future wide open, the tears welling in their family’s eyes. And then twenty seconds later, another video: a widow and her young children, faces hollow with fresh loss. And I am broken. Feelers don’t get the luxury of a healthy degree of separation; it's right here, right now, every second of our days.

Past, present, and future, haunting us with a steady ache that doesn’t scream, doesn’t demand, but simply settles in like it belongs. It doesn’t knock us flat; it wears us down. The way a constant hum can drive a person mad, the way an old injury still throbs when the weather shifts. It’s not often urgent. It’s not loud. It’s just there.

Sunday mornings, what should be light and joyful fellowship often feels like a funeral march. I see smiles that don’t reach eyes, voices that crack just enough to betray the burden they’re hiding. Small talk floats above, but underneath it thrums with all that goes unsaid: grief, fear, fractured relationships, shame too heavy to name. People talk about laying burdens down, but some of us pick them up without trying, and they sit in our chests until we can hardly breathe.

A passing glance at the girl in the Mini Cooper with her face turned toward the window, sadness etched in her shoulders. A man gripping the steering wheel too tightly, shouting into his phone. An elderly woman blinking hard, trying to focus on the road while holding something deeper than traffic in her gaze. I see them for a second and then I’m carrying the weight of a story I don't even know. Living in constant whiplash between someone else’s joy and someone else’s despair, and that of your own, trying to find space to exist.

People like to say, “our souls were never meant for this,” as if the sheer volume of what we witness now is somehow outside of God’s plan. But I really think God is big enough to say what He means and mean what He says. If we are here, then this is part of the story.

And still, I struggle to hold it. The grief of the world presses like a storm front that never moves. My words falter. My thoughts start and stall. The air is heavy with mourning, with fear, with the ache of things breaking and never being put back together.

I am tired of being both thinker and feeler. Of living decades ahead in dread while clawing to stay tethered to now. I am tired of the ache in my chest, the trembling in my hands, the weight that has no outlet.

And the constant debate: what am I even supposed to do with this weight? Where does it go?

There are days I could morph these thoughts into a tidy post about solutions. About how somatic practices help, about how yoga supports regulation, about how breath can steady what feels unbearable. And those things do help. But lately, the weight is so suffocating, I can’t even pretend to offer solace.

All I can offer is this: feelers, empaths, burdened, heavy souls, load bearers, it's okay to not be okay. I’m melting in my own puddle, too. I have no advice. No quick fixes. No steps. Just grief. Just weight. Just too much. I don’t have the energy to dress this up as resilience. I don’t have the desire to turn it into steps or tips or practices.

Today, I just want to name it:

It’s heavy. It hurts. It feels like too much.

And yet, here we are. Feelers. Empaths. Load bearers. We keep waking up. We keep carrying on. We keep absorbing the ache, even when it drowns us. If your chest aches, if your tears come too quickly, if your heart can’t stop breaking for both the mundane and the monumental — I’m right here with you. I don’t have solutions. I just have the grief, the exhaustion, the puddle I’m melting into.

And maybe, for today, that’s enough.

See you on the mat.