Not mine to carry: The hidden struggle of the empath

It often begins so quietly you don’t even realize it’s happening. 

You’re talking to someone—maybe a friend, maybe a stranger in line at the grocery store—and by the end of the conversation, their sadness is sitting in your chest. Their anxiety has taken up residence in your gut. 

And though they’ve walked away lighter, you’re left holding a heaviness that doesn’t even belong to you.

I used to think this was compassion. I used to think this was what it meant to be good, to care, to love without condition. That if someone was in pain, the kindest thing I could do was meet them there. Not metaphorically, but literally—energetically. 

I let their emotions become mine. Their storms, my weather. And I did this without question, without boundaries, without knowing there was even an option to do otherwise.

Being an empath is often spoken about like a gift. But there’s another side to it. A shadow. A weight. A kind of inherited suffering that comes not from life itself but from your relationship to others’ pain. 

And if you’re not careful, that sensitivity can hollow you out. You become a sponge. Soaking in what isn’t yours. Forgetting what is.

The world rewards empathy but rarely teaches emotional boundaries. We’re told to be kind, be available, be supportive. But not how to discern between compassion and enmeshment. Between care and self-erasure. 

Psychology uses the language of co-regulation and mirror neurons to explain why we internalize others’ emotional states. 

Buddhism talks about interbeing—that we are all connected, that your suffering is not separate from mine. But interbeing was never meant to mean infiltration.

Somewhere along the line, I had confused openness with absence of self. And I think this confusion is not just mine. So many empaths carry this hidden contradiction: the desire to be present with others while quietly losing themselves in the process. We’re praised for our emotional intelligence while privately drowning in emotional overload.

And here’s the cruel irony. The more overwhelmed we become, the less capacity we have to show up meaningfully. The very thing we pride ourselves on—our deep sensitivity—can become the reason we burn out, shut down, or numb ourselves completely.

There were times I tried to fix this by closing off. Building emotional walls, becoming distant. But that only created another form of suffering. 

Disconnection isn’t the antidote to overconnection. It’s a trauma response masquerading as protection. 

What I learned—slowly, imperfectly, through practice and failure—is that the answer is not to feel less, but to feel differently.

Mindfulness taught me that awareness isn’t just about noticing others. It’s about noticing myself, too. That I could be present with someone’s grief without making it mine. That I could acknowledge a friend’s anxiety without internalizing it. 

I started to visualize emotions—mine and others’—as weather patterns. Some passed quickly. Some lingered. But none of them needed to take permanent residence.

There’s a Zen saying: “Let everything come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.” I used to invite every emotion in like a long-lost relative. Now, I nod. I acknowledge. But I don’t always invite them to stay.

What complicates this, though, is the cultural story around being a good person. Particularly for women, and especially in spiritual or helping communities, there’s an unspoken belief that to care is to carry. That real love means sacrifice. That boundaries are barriers, not bridges. 

And so many empaths grow up believing that their emotional permeability is a virtue—not realizing it’s also a vulnerability.

But Buddhist practice invites a different kind of presence. One that is full but not flooded. Compassion with equanimity. 

You can touch suffering without drowning in it. You can sit with someone’s pain and still remain grounded in your own breath, your own body, your own center.

What I’ve come to believe is that the gift of empathy isn’t the ability to feel what others feel. It’s the ability to stay human in the presence of pain—yours or theirs—without trying to fix it, flee from it, or fuse with it. 

And this takes practice. It takes forgetting and remembering. It takes sitting in silence after a heavy conversation and asking: What is mine? What is not?

There’s a moment in Buddhist meditation called the pause. It’s not dramatic. It’s a simple breath—a space between stimulus and response. 

I’ve started building those pauses into my life. When I feel someone’s energy pressing in, I pause. I breathe. I return to my body. It’s not detachment. It’s remembrance. Of who I am. Where I end and they begin.

In a culture that equates empathy with emotional absorption, it can feel radical to simply observe without absorbing. To let someone cry without echoing their tears. To walk away from a conversation and still feel whole.

But this is the paradox of being an empath: The more grounded you are in yourself, the more available you become to others. 

Not as a sponge. But as a mirror. 

Not to feel for someone, but to be with them. Fully. Human to human. Present, but intact.

And maybe that’s what true compassion looks like—not collapsing into someone’s sorrow, but staying rooted enough to remind them of their own strength.

It’s not about building walls. It’s about becoming spacious.

So now, when someone’s emotions come toward me, I don’t resist. I also don’t absorb. I breathe. I soften. I stay. 

And in that space between reaction and fusion, something else emerges—clarity. The kind that can hold pain without becoming it. The kind that lets love flow both ways.

This is what I’ve learned. Not how to stop feeling. But how to stop forgetting who I am when I do.