If you know anything about me, it’s that I’m sensitive. I cry all the time – yesterday, I saw a three-legged deer while driving and genuinely had to pull over because I was crying so much it became dangerous.
I cry every time I see roadkill, watch a sad (or happy) movie and read a book or a poem I cry, and I’m tired of that being seen as a bad thing. Being sensitive isn’t a weakness – if anything, I think it’s a strength.
When people around me are struggling, it’s easier for me to meet them where they are. I don’t have to guess what something might feel like if I can sympathize with them and simply be present to support them. That doesn’t fix anything, but it matters when most of the time, people aren’t looking for solutions; they’re looking to be understood.
And maybe I do get upset more often than others, but that also means when I’m happy, I think I feel that stronger than the average person, too. I cry at moments that feel fleeting and beautiful: like graduations, weddings and concerts. If that means I romanticize life, what’s the crime in holding onto and valuing these moments instead of letting them pass unnoticed?
That sensitivity bleeds into everything else I do and create, whether that’s making friends, painting or writing. I’ve conducted countless interviews and attended many events during my time as a student journalist, and some of those meetings required emotional sensitivity and awareness because the topics were so deep and personal.
I’m a watercolor artist, and when I write creatively, it’s usually poetry or creative non-fiction. In my personal experience, I’m only inspired to create if I feel something first, and that is very hard to fake.
You can’t write honestly or make anything worth engaging with without first feeling something. Your emotional response to life and tears is what makes art possible in the first place.
When people see tears or strong reactions, they assume it means a lack of control. What they don’t see is the awareness underneath it; being sensitive requires a constant engagement with your surroundings, other people and yourself.
And yes, there are moments where I wish I could turn it down. It would be easier not to cry at things that don’t directly affect me, easier not to carry other people’s emotions as heavily. But I also know what I’d lose if I did that. I’d lose the ability to connect as deeply, to create with the same honesty, to experience joy without holding anything back.
Sometimes, it’s embarrassing. I hate when I cry and I feel like I don’t deserve to, like I didn’t experience enough pain to cry – like a funeral of a family friend I am not the closest to.
But grief, and emotions in general, don’t operate on a hierarchy the way we try to force them to. There isn’t some clean threshold you have to meet before you’re “allowed” to feel something. Sometimes it’s not even about the person or the moment in isolation. It’s about what that moment represents: loss in general, the awareness that people leave, that time moves whether you’re ready for it or not.
I hate to reference “Glee” again, but I have to. At one point, the guidance counselor, Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays), says that when she was a child, and Princess Diana died, she was so depressed, even though Diana didn’t mean “that much” to her. Instead, Diana represented the loss of childhood and stood as a placeholder for her to express her emotions of graduating and leaving her friends and family for college soon.
I think this is extremely common for “sensitive” people to do: they find something that seems “easier” to blame their emotions on, but I wish we lived in a society that was more accepting of everyone who is emotional, regardless of whether our culture deems it justifiable.
