The life of an empath might seem the hardest journey ever, but once an empath learns how to protect themselves from the outside sensitivities, the thoughts, feelings, and energies, it gets a lot easier to survive and thrive as well.
I wish I could be one of those people who do not have to feel too much about everything all the time or explode myself with energies from my surroundings. For most of my life, being an empath, I wondered why subtle things bothered me while others remained so unperturbed with those shifts in energy.
Okay, wait. Certain people do not even get this mere fact that people do in fact emit vibes and it affects some people. I certainly believed that I had the ability to read people and into their intentions, alongside being hypersensitive to their altering emotions. This got me frustrated as I kept collecting emotions from people and it overwhelmed me all at once.
At the end of the day when I was unwinding all of it, it indeed gave insight about myself but it did leave me in pieces. I could not get over those unsettling emotions for days at once and it affected my appetite, disturbed my sleep, and completely threw me off the charts. But who would understand?
It isn’t an easy task to be comprehensible to other people about what really was bothering me. Hell no! Because most of them had no patience to accept concepts beyond their ken.
They could come off with “I understand that you are emotionally sensitive.” No. I wasn’t just intuitive, now I was becoming more inclined towards having the ability to scan people beyond their superficial selves.
Their pasts experiences, started That’s how it felt. It was more than reading a person and their body language. On an intensive scale, I was zooming in on them, how their eyelashes made a move, how their lips curled, how their skin flushed, and how their eyes watered near the corner. Everything was exaggerated and more intense than they were in reality.
Read: 13 Traits Of A Real Empath
I secluded myself to deal with all this bullshit which weren’t my own. I started disconnecting from my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues and this progressively extended to my family members. Every trivial thing startled me, and I found it quite difficult to cope with daily interactions.
I started training myself to be disciplined, I began to follow a daily schedule, I planned my weekdays in advance to cut down on stress, I worked on minimizing procrastinating by setting false deadlines. I invested in yoga and meditation. Apart from all these, I significantly reduced my unhealthy food intake and started living a regimented life.
To my surprise, some of it really worked (while some didn’t). I was initially dragging myself through hell. Now it seemed like I could see some light at the end of my path. I was more focused and less heavy on myself now.
I was moving slow but sure of my destination. Sticking to the strict schedule often got the best of me but I was gradually getting accustomed to the positive modifications I started to bring into my life.
All along the process, living the life of an empath, I became aware of a few fundamental truths which I want to put here as my confessions of being an empath.
5 Fundamental Truths I Learned About Life In My Journey As An Empath
1. People lack empathy
Hate to put it out in the open but yes, people out there just lack the ability to comprehend other people’s emotions, even to least validate them. They are so stuck up in their own mindset, that looking outside the box is not their cup of tea. Being an empath, I realized this over and over again, in my journey toward self-acceptance.
When I found other people disapproving of my abilities, this often leads me to reject the crux of my emotional experiences. If they said those feelings were not true, I believed those really weren’t. This made it difficult for me to accept and appreciate myself. I had to put myself out of their frame and look into myself. This helped me differentiate between their perspective and mine.
2. Genuine connections are rare
Those soul-warming, heart-melting, mind-boggling, ethereal connections are the rarest of rare. If you feel like a connection with someone has encompassed this realm, don’t let it go.
3. Intuitions are real and powerful
The most important lesson I have learned as an empath is never to disregard one’s inner chimes. You will regret it later for sure. This intuition comes from within yourself, its source is not based outside. It’s your body, mind, and soul dancing to the same tune. An additional knowledge I gained about intuition is that it strengthens with experience.
Certain circumstances, certain people, places, and voices gave me goosebumps, my skin curled and my body reacted very weirdly. Initially, I nonchalantly shrugged off these physical reactions. But soon enough I started noticing a pattern.
Every time I tossed these signals aside and moved on the wrong path, I faced potent obstacles which lead me to dead ends. With time I became more attuned with what those bodily symptoms meant for me. When that internal bell rings, attend to it.
Read: 8 Signs You’re A Highly Intuitive Empath Sensitive To Energy
4. Everything is synchronized
Nothing is randomly placed. Life has an inherent rhythm to it. Interestingly, I got to realize this during the periods I wrapped myself in solitude. The rush of the busy life keeps you under the illusion that every incident is isolated from one another. But if you slow down, look closer, you will learn that things are interconnected. Everything is in harmony.
This synchronization is one powerful key of life to reckon with. Some indications will serve as a warning sign and others all flowery and cheerful, greeting you to a new beginning. Observe deeply and accept what transpires by allowing it to work for you even when the details are obscure.
5. A personal boundary is an essential tool for survival
Being an empath, this is one of the most crucial things to keep in mind is to create a boundary for yourself. A strict, non-negotiable one for that matter. You need to learn to blurt out that ‘no’ hanging at the tip of your tongue, quite literally. Empaths often get it all mixed as it becomes difficult for them to separate their emotions from other people’s emotions, as they tend to imbibe other people’s emotions into their systems.
Boundaries help them recognize emotions exclusively belonging to them. What I always did was ask myself, “Are these my own emotions or are these emotions introjected from others?” Learning to differentiate between your own and others’ emotions will free you of the emotional flooding.
Personal space and ‘me time’ became important for me as I needed a considerable amount of time to unburden all those negative emotions that drained me throughout my interactions with people. To hell with people who thought I was asocial because all I was doing was trying to safeguard myself from getting my emotional experiences contaminated.
Empaths need themselves to be their own steady companions. Hold on. Don’t give up on yourself. There is you, there’s me, and many more like us, who struggle with their innate abilities to feel deeper. Consider this a gift nature bestowed upon you.
Cheers!
