I Carry What Isn’t Mine

When you grieve, I feel it.

Not in the way people say they do—softly, briefly, before moving on—but in a way that lingers. I see your post. I see your heart. I carry it with me long after everyone else has scrolled past.

I mention it to someone, and they say, “Oh, how sad,” and continue with their day.

I can’t.

I sit in your loss. I don’t try to make it mine. I don’t imagine myself in your place. I just feel the weight of it—steady, persistent, impossible to ignore.

It stays with me for days.

A quiet ache. A heaviness I can’t quite explain. Sometimes it grows so large I have to dull it, to soften the edges of something that feels too sharp to hold all at once.

So I distract myself. I reach for light.

A friend handed me a “radiate positivity” sticker the other day and told me it made her think of me.

She isn’t wrong.

To most people, I am sunshine. Easy laughter. A bright presence. The girl who greets you with a smile before you’ve even had your first sip of coffee.

I have learned how to be that version of myself.

But it isn’t the whole story.

Because when others hurt, I feel it—every shift in tone, every quiet sadness, every unspoken weight. I carry more than what is mine, and sometimes, when my own emotions rise, there is nowhere left to put them,

They spill over.

My eyes become a breaking point, a dam that cannot hold everything it’s been asked to contain.

I may be sunshine.

But I am also rain.

That is why I write.

Because I cannot keep all of this inside me. Because feeling everything has to go somewhere. Because tears are not always enough.

So I put it into words.

I don’t always show how deeply I feel things. Most of the time, I smile. I keep moving. I let the world believe the lighter version of me.

But if you are hurting—if you are grieving something no one else seems to notice—

I see you.