Deep Runs The Well

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I live life in the deep end. It is often hard for me to not become fully submerged in feelings, emotions, in being. I carry the full sum of love and grief on the inside of me, and oh how gravely do my bones know the weight of it all.

I used to believe that God had cursed my name. To be on the observing side of life to such an extent felt insufferable, leaving me often trying to rid my heart of the ability to feel, and feel deeply. I wanted to subtract myself from the equation of what seemed like endless burdening and a lack of equilibrium. Of being what I considered an inordinately tender/fragile/delicate/sensitive soul in an unseemly world.

There’s this quote by Glennon Doyle Melton that shakes me to the core every time I come across it. It reads: “I'm not a mess, but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, 'For the same reason I laugh so often — because I'm paying attention.'”

Sometimes it feels like I’m not just paying attention with my eyes wide open, but with my heart wide open, with my arms wide open, with my soul wide open. Like I am living to the very root of all humankind. And all the while, the afflictions of this messy world echo on the insides of my being, bouncing around the walls like a ship in troubled water, with no anchor and no shore.

A friend of mine once said to me, “Some people are not here to live deeply.” And in bringing this up in conversation with another friend, she took it a step further saying that while some people are indeed not here to live deeply, some people are not here to live simply. That shifted something in me.

It grew to my understanding that the world needs both types of people. It’s like a balancing of the forces. We all have our rightful place, our rightful strengths and weaknesses. And while I have spent years trying to run away from my deep-well-living, I have recently found myself leaning in.

I ran across a blog by Daisy Rosales that quotes: “My definition of living deeply is a combination of self-awareness, spiritual conviction, faithful dedication, and communal connection. It brings meaning where meaning is absent.”

How beautiful a way to transcribe the act of deep living.

I have an attentiveness to myself, to the emotions I carry, that I cannot get rid of, no matter how hard I may try. I cannot outrun my internal nudging to add definition where discourse lacks, to bring substance to where it is unknown.

It is not overall a curse, my feeling deeply that is. As Jayne Eyre put it: “The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway; and asserting a right to predominate: to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, — and to speak.” 

The forcefulness of my emotions in itself is not the burdening. It is when that vigor demands, with urgency, to take full throttle, to dictate and govern my every step, my every breath. It is when it intends to loom over my functioning; plaguing, poisoning, and tormenting my mind. It is when it tries to make me its servant, tethering me to the tossing and the toiling of a hard-minded unease.

But when I learn to work with them and not for them, my emotions that is, that is where the blessing is found. I become more informed, more emotionally intelligent, and, therefore, more emotionally responsible.

I know that I am not alone, that I am amongst many empathetic, deep others to whom most things in life are a spiritual experience. To whom intensity and passion are our charge. And so to those people I say: lean in. Living life in the deep end can be a double-edged sword, for we see life in a color that has not yet been named, speak in a language that is of only our own, hear in a rhythm that does not fall well upon the ears of all, and love and bruise more frequently in the mayhem of it all.

But we have our necessary place in this world. To provide meaning. To evoke feeling. We are the braille for those bound to simplicity, blind to the worlds that exist in depth.

As I rest my thoughts on this, I would like to end with a response that I found on an online forum dissecting the blessing and curse of highly sensitive people:

“In my experience it’s the sensitive people that have given me the most interesting and life-changing conversations and moments of life filled with connection and soul insights. They're the poets, the artists, the ones who see beauty where others don’t, and the empaths that feel their humanity and that of others.”