Where You Couldn’t Follow

I kept looking for you in places you never knew existed.

Not because you didn’t care. You did, in the way you knew how, in the language you were given, in the depth you were capable of.

And I don’t say that to be cruel. I say it because I spent a long time thinking something was wrong with me for needing more than that.

Maybe our languages were just different. Maybe you were speaking in gestures, and I was waiting for something that felt deeper.

Neither of us was wrong. We were just not built for the same kind of conversation.

But it gets lonely here.

Down in this place where everything means something, where a look stays with you for days, where you feel the weight of a room the moment you walk into it, where you carry people’s unspoken things without them ever asking you to.

Nobody tells you that this is what sensitivity feels like from the inside. Not poetic or special. Just heavy sometimes, a little too aware for your own comfort.

I have sat with people I loved and still felt completely unreached. Not because they weren’t there. They were right there.

But there is a particular kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being alone. It is the loneliness of being seen on the surface while the deeper parts of you quietly go unvisited.

And for a long time I thought if I just explained myself better, found the right words, the right moment, the right way in, someone would finally meet me there.

But I think some places inside you, most people just cannot reach. Not because you are too much. Because they haven’t been to those places in themselves yet.

And maybe that’s where the unfairness lives. Not in anyone’s failure. Just in the gap between what one person carries and what another was ever taught to hold.

It is unfair to you, yes. But it is also unfair to them to be expected to go somewhere they have never been shown how to go.

That always did and still breaks my heart.

Now I think it just means I was always going to have to learn how to be my own company down here. How to sit with the depth instead of constantly reaching for someone to share it with. How to stop apologizing for feeling everything so completely and start understanding that it is also the reason I write the way I do, love the way I do, and see people the way I do.

The curse and the gift are the same thing.

I was never too much. I was just too much for the wrong places.

And there is a difference, even if it took me a long time to feel it.

I am still learning to call this home.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.