Many who call themselves empaths have, at some point, complained of the weight of emotions too large for one body—of sorrows not theirs, yet somehow weeping from within.
I understand this ache well.
And still, I have felt reluctant to claim the title.
Not out of denial—
but out of discernment of what it really means to be “an empath”
I didn’t resonate with the egregore of the empath: that mythic figure caught between victim and hero.
There is, I believe,
a kind of spiritual martyrdom that hides in plain sight—
a longing to be good,
to be useful,
to be redeemed
by absorbing the ache of others.
But why must one take on the world’s pain to begin with?
What unseen karma spins the thread
of over-identification with sorrow?
Karma is not punishment.
It is memory reflected—
the shape of our becoming
revealed in the mirror of experience.
If I feel this heaviness—
what does it invite me to do?
Or more deeply—
what does this invite me to see?
If I’m attuned to suffering,
and have mistaken it as my own—
What might that suggest
about when I was the one who caused harm?
We don't internalize the suffering of others,
unless at some level, we feel we need to
The oppressor becomes the oppressed—
the perpetrator, now victim
I remember.
The warrior in me—fierce, righteous, blind.
I have wept at the weight of his sword.
Wept rivers no battlefield could drink.
In this life, I’ve emerged from hell.
And I don’t intend to return—
especially now that I have felt so deeply.
So I say gently,
but with conviction:
An empath is not a hero.
An empath is a soul studying
the consequence of separation.
A being learning, deeply:
That no victory is true
if it asks another to lose.
Whatever blade we press into another’s chest will, in time,
pierce through our own.
The Great War is not with others—
it is with our own delusion with the truth at is deepest roots.
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