Living With The Openness...
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| Empath and Taylor Swift fan, lol |
If someone around me cries, I feel it in my chest before I can even think about it. If the mood shifts, I shift with it. Tension settles into my bones, joy lifts me up, and I carry both with me long after the moment has passed.
And this space - this blog - is where I put those feelings.
I write about parenting, love, and romance. But more than that, I write about what those things feel like from the inside. The messy parts. The vulnerable parts. The things that don’t always have neat conclusions.
And that’s where it gets… complicated.
Because every time I post, I’m opening a door into my inner world. People read it. They understand me - sometimes deeply. They see pieces of my life, my thoughts, my heart.
But I don’t see theirs.
That imbalance is strange. Intimate, but one-sided. Like being known without knowing in return.
This blog has been both a blessing and a weight, if I’m being honest.
It’s brought people back into my life - friends I haven’t spoken to since grade school, fellow authors, even people from chapters of my past I thought were long closed. Some of those reconnections have been beautiful. Some… more complicated.
And then there are the strangers.
The ones who reach out to say, this meant something to me. Those moments are powerful. They remind me why I write at all.
But even then, there’s that same quiet imbalance. They’ve seen me. Felt me. Connected to something I’ve shared.
And I’m left holding a glimpse of them, but never the full picture.
For someone like me - someone who craves closure, who likes to understand where things begin and end - that can be exhausting. There’s no clean way to file those interactions away. No neat resolution. Just open loops.
With my books, it’s different. Feedback - good or bad - has edges. It lands somewhere. Even criticism has a kind of clarity to it. Not everyone will love what I write, and that’s okay. I don’t love every book I read either. That doesn’t make it bad - it just means it wasn’t for me.
But this blog?
This is softer. More exposed. Less defined.
It’s not just stories - it’s pieces of me.
And sometimes, sending those pieces out into the world without knowing where they land, or how they settle, or what they become in someone else’s mind… it’s a lot to carry.
But maybe that’s the trade-off.
To be seen, even partially. To connect, even without full reciprocity. To create something that reaches someone, even if the ending of that interaction is unknown.
Maybe not everything is meant to be tied up neatly.
Maybe some things are meant to stay open.
And maybe part of being an empath - part of being a writer - is learning how to live with that openness… without letting it consume you.
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