Vachon Imagined

There is a misunderstanding about empathy that makes it feel like love is measured by how much you can hold. As though being good means being open without limit. As though connection is proven through absorption.

But empathy is not meant to be a place where everything goes to be carried.

It is presence. Not containment.

And yet there are moments where you realize you have become exactly that—a place where emotion arrives, is felt, and then left behind. Not always intentionally. Not always with awareness. But it lands in you anyway.

And you start to notice something strange: people leave lighter, and you are not always sure what you are left holding.

You are not meant to be where other people offload themselves.

At first, it feels like love. You say, I meet you here. You mean it. You are there. You can feel it. You can track the shift in someone’s voice, the weight behind their words, the thing they cannot quite say.

But slowly, “here” stops being mutual. It becomes a place people arrive at, discharge into, and move on from.

And you remain in it.

You start to confuse what you feel with what has been placed in you. Their sadness, their anger, their confusion—it doesn’t always stay in its original shape. It settles. It blends. It becomes harder to separate where they end and you begin.

You are not meant to be where other people offload themselves.

And there is something even more difficult to admit: people are drawn to what can hold them.

Not always consciously. Not always with intent. But they sense where something can take in what they cannot carry. And they move toward it.

They bring what is unprocessed. What is too heavy. What has nowhere else to go. And sometimes it lands in you simply because you are open.

And over time, openness without protection becomes exhaustion that doesn’t have a name yet.

You begin to feel tired in ways that are not just physical. Heavy in ways that are not just emotional. Confused in ways that feel like you should be able to explain it—but you can’t quite find the origin.

You are not meant to be where other people offload themselves.

There is a moment where it turns. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But quietly.

Where you realize you cannot tell what is yours anymore without stopping and sorting through it. Where empathy starts to feel less like connection and more like exposure.

Where you think: I can’t stay in this anymore.

Not because you stopped caring.

But because there was never a boundary around caring.

You are not meant to be where other people offload themselves.

And so the work is not to stop feeling. It is to stop disappearing inside what you feel.

To notice when something is arriving that does not belong to you. To recognize the difference between witnessing someone and carrying them. To stay present without becoming the place where everything gets stored.

This is not less empathy.

It is the beginning of discernment inside it.

You are not meant to be where other people offload themselves.

And when that becomes clear, something shifts. Not into distance. Not into hardness.

But into return.

To your true nature, your true self.