The empath\’s backpack (or: whose shit are you carrying?)

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I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Jen Pastiloff\’s workshop ON BEING HUMAN this weekend, in New York.  It was my sixth, in five years.  It never gets old. She is always coming up with different activities, different prompts, different music. And I\’ve done the same prompts in multiple workshops and something new always shows up. And of course, she is the container, and the workshop itself is how we all respond.  It\’s amazing to watch people go from quiet strangers to blubbering group hugs in less than three hours.

She told a story I\’ve heard her tell many times, and I love it. This time, though, I thought about it in the context of being an Empath (see my post on empaths here).
here is the story:

She worked at the same restaurant for 13-plus years. And she carried a big backpack with her; she says she was like a bag lady, always worried she would need something, always carrying too much around.
So there\’s a metaphor in and of itself-but the story gets better.

the guys in the kitchen used to prank her by putting stuff in her bag and seeing if she would notice it was heavier.  Once it was a cast-iron skillet. Once it was a honeydew melon!  She never noticed, till she got home and unpacked.

She said this, and I wrote it down, because it really struck me:

\”I carried so much shit that I didn\’t notice when other people\’s shit got in there.\”

Raise your hand if you can relate. {raising my hand}

And I thought: yes, I did that for a long time. I did it for a lot of reasons: I\’m female. I\’m emotional. I\’m a nurturer. There is a family legacy of pain (as there is in every family I\’ve ever seen) that I guess I, being Highly Sensitive, absorbed.  Old habits die hard. I became a social worker, for the love of Pete-I made a CAREER out of \”carrying other people\’s stuff\”. I became a professional other-people\’s-stuff-carrier.

And pretty early on, I got burnt out. That\’s when I realized what I was doing and worked really hard to change that pattern. I went to therapy and I read books and I journaled and I peeled back some painful layers. It was hard. Sometimes it still is.

And while I was listening to this story, again, on Saturday–and loving it,  I thought:
I am an Empath.

That means that it doesn\’t even take the guys in the kitchen putting heavy shit in my bag.
That means that even though I\’ve worked REALLY hard to not carry so much shit around, and REALLY hard to notice when other people\’s shit gets mixed up in there….still, other stuff is going to get in.

Because that\’s what being an Empath means. It means we are sponges for the energy around us. Emotional energy. Interpersonal energy.  Systemic energy. Planetary energy. We get drained SO easily. It takes so much to be out in the world, being a sponge for that, and not get weighed down with it. It\’s like being a magnet and walking around and little metal chips are always flying around, everywhere–but when  fly by you, they STICK. Only they are invisible.  A lot of the time I don\’t even realize I\’m absorbing the energy of a place, or channeling the emotions of the people around me.

Jen calls this \”carry only what you need\”.  Isn\’t that just fantastic wisdom?  And we know it\’s hard, and it takes work.

For us Empaths, it\’s usually harder, and it usually takes more work. Sometimes,  a lot more work.  I just want you to know: if you are an Empath, if you are Highly Sensitive, if for whatever reason you find yourself carrying what you don\’t need, or what is not yours: I SEE YOU.

I see how hard it is. I see how hard it is to keep your energy up. I see how hard it is to feel the pain of others. I know that feeling well. I see how hard it is to KNOW what is yours and what is others.

I see you.

And we Empaths can do this, you know. We can learn to protect our energy and radically care for ourselves and develop awareness of what is ours and what isn\’t, what serves and what doesn\’t. We can. But it\’s a lot more work. I just want you to know that if any this resonates with you, you are not alone. Far from it. There are so many of us that are Highly Sensitive, that are energy sponges, that have inherited pain from our family histories. 

I see you.

So….what is in your backpack? Do you know what\’s in there?  Are you aware? Are you afraid to look? I know I was for a really long time, and sometimes I still am. Or it gets filled up, busting at the seams, before I am even conscious of it. I have to get sick or have an accident or forget to pay a bill or feed the cats before I realize: Damn, I\’m carrying way too much. That backpack is about to bust.

And that, believe it or not,  is the magic moment. The moment when  we can take the backpack off. Yeah, it\’s scary to open it.  But trust me: it\’s more scary not to.

I see you, you who are carrying what you don\’t need. What\’s not yours. And I\’m here to tell you that yes-it\’s  hard work. But as Glennon Doyle says: we can do hard things.  And it\’s so worth it.

Image: New York Skyline

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[image: Book cover of On Being Human by Jennifer Pastiloff]