Between Tears & Stone: Living in the Space Between Emotional and Emotionless

Some days I’m all heat, raw nerve, cracked open. I’ll mourn a film-dog’s death. I’ll sob when the moon outshines the night. I’ll bleed compassion, empathy, ache — stitched deep into my skin.

And then, in the blink of a scarred eye: silence.

I can ride a storm that would drown most souls — and walk away unscarred.

They call me cold. Call me fragile. Call me “too sensitive.” They don’t know how to read a woman built from contradiction: A heart that hurts too deep — and a soul that locks itself away.

When I love — I burn. I memorize

the wavering pitch of your tired voice,

the color your eyes shift to when you laugh.

I cherish the small things you don’t even notice about yourself.

But once I shut the door? Knock all you want — I’m not opening.

It’s not that I stopped caring.

It’s that caring became unbearable.

I am more than emotion.

I am also the silence that follows it.

A heart that feels. A soul that shields.

That’s the woman I am.

Author’s Note

I write pieces like this because I’ve lived in that in-between space my whole damn life — the place where I feel everything too deeply until suddenly I don’t feel a thing at all.

It’s not contradiction; it’s survival.

It’s the way some of us learned to hold our own heart without breaking it.

If this hit you, it’s probably because you’ve lived there too — in that quiet tug-of-war between sensitivity and self-protection.

Between the part of you that loves like wildfire and the part that shuts the gates when the burn becomes too much.

My work exists for people like us.

People who feel loudly in a world that keeps asking us to go mute.

People who’ve been told they’re “too sensitive,” “too cold,” or “too much” — when really, we’re just learning how to survive the weight of our own depth.

Thank you for reading me, seeing me, and meeting me in the middle — in that strange, sacred space where emotion and emptiness share the same heartbeat.