I Learned to Feel Deeply, But Sometimes It Drowns Me
Romanticizing life taught me it's worth living, but sometimes it makes living feel impossible.
I trained myself to see the beauty in the small moments: the light reflected on buildings, the smile between strangers on the street, the quiet ritual of my morning walk without headphones.
It’s how I’ve learned to remember that life is worth living after struggling with suicidal ideation since childhood.
Loving the world so deeply, though, means I feel the ache just as deeply, too. And sometimes that ache feels impossible to hold.
I live with cyclothymic disorder—a mild form of bipolar that makes it hard to regulate my emotions. Sometimes I joke that my feelings really have nowhere to go except all the way out. As a kid, I was “sensitive,” always taking things to heart and storming away from the dinner table when my feelings were hurt. Back then, I was told I was overreacting. Now, I know it’s just how I’m wired: to feel everything at a volume that most people can’t imagine.
But it’s not always so funny, because feeling deeply isn’t just about savoring a perfect sunrise or crying happy tears at the top of a mountain. It means the lows hit just as a hard as the highs.
When I’m standing on a trail in Norway, nine miles into my first solo hike, staring down from a single rock shaped like a troll’s tongue (Trolltunga, if you’re the outdoorsy type—highly recommend) jutting over a fjord between rich and vibrant, green mountains, my whole body feels like it’s vibrating with life.
Or when I drive through Patagonia for two hours in the pitch dark, my headlights barely cutting through the dark, waiting for the first light to rise over the peaks of Torres del Paine, I remember, This is what it feels like to be glad I’m still alive.
But the depth goes both ways. The same mind that floods me with awe can drown me in heartbreak, too. The gut-wrenching pain of losing someone I thought I’d never have to say goodbye to. The sickening pit in my stomach when I feel rejection from friends who say they love me, but don’t show up the way I hoped they would.
Some days, I feel like my nervous system is a raw nerve—wide open to everything beautiful and brutal at once. There’s no dial to turn it down, just the constant practice of reminding myself that it won’t always feel this sharp.
People love to label people like me: too sensitive, too much, crazy, even unhinged. I heard it as a kid, and I still hear it now—the suggestion that my depth is a flaw, that my feelings need to be managed or muted to make me easier to love.
What they don’t see is that this same sensitivity is the reason I notice the way the light bends through the trees at golden hour. It’s why a single song can bring me to tears in the middle of my morning walk. It’s why I remember tiny details about people, like how they take their coffee, the way they look when they’re about to say something brave.
It’s why I can sit with a client, a friend, a stranger, and hold space for the thing they’re afraid to say out loud—because I know what it’s like to feel something that big.
I could close myself off. Lot’s of people do. It would be easier, sometimes, to just shut the door, build thicker walls, and decide that caring less is safer than being gutted by my own heart.
But the cost would be way too high. If I turned down the volume on my ache, I’d lose the part of me that notices the softness, too. The wonder. The moments that remind me why I keep choosing to stay.
Feeling deeply is how I find my way back to myself when the darkness tries to convince me there’s no point in living. It’s how I fall in love with the world (and with life) over and over again after my mind convinces me not to.
If you’re wired like me—if your heart feels like an open wound some days and an endless well the next—I hope you remember this:
You’re not broken for feeling it all.
You don’t need to be less sensitive to be worthy of staying.
This part of you isn’t something to fix. It’s something to carry, carefully, honestly, and without shame.
May your depth always lead you back to the tiny moments that make life feel worth it: the light, the laughter, the people who see all of you and don’t flinch.
The world needs people who feel like you do.
Don’t let your mind convince you otherwise.