The Sponge

I know of a girl and she’s a sponge.

The kind of sponge that absorbs people.

She absorbs pauses in conversations. The slight change in someone’s tone. The way a person suddenly becomes distant even while saying “I’m fine.” She notices when laughter is forced. She notices when someone is trying not to cry. She notices when energy changes, even before words do.

And the strange thing is that people rarely notice how much of them she carries afterwards.

Someone speaks to her for five minutes and she’ll spend the rest of the day feeling heavy because she sensed something underneath their words. A room can become tense and her body immediately responds to it. If someone she loves is hurting, it sits inside her too, like emotions are transferable and her heart forgot to reject the package.

Sometimes she envies people who can leave interactions untouched.

People who can hear painful things and continue with their day normally. People who don’t replay conversations in their heads at 2 a.m. wondering if someone sounded sad. People who don’t internalize the emotional climate of every room they enter.

Because for her, emotions are contagious.

She feels people so deeply that she sometimes loses track of herself inside them.

And honestly, it’s exhausting.

There are days she isolates herself because she cannot carry one more person’s disappointment, anger, confusion, silence, or sadness on top of my own. There are days she becomes emotionally overwhelmed without even understanding why, until she realizes she has spent the whole week emotionally tending to everybody around her.

But she also thinks this softness is part of what makes her human.

It’s why she loves the way she does. It’s why people open up to her so easily. It’s why she cannot ignore pain when she sees it. It’s why she instinctively reaches for people emotionally. Her heart is always listening, even when she wishes it would rest.

She’s learning that being a sponge for people’s emotions means she has to be intentional about protecting her own.

Because empathy without boundaries becomes self-abandonment.

And maybe that’s the lesson she’s slowly growing into. Learning how to care deeply without drowning in everybody else’s feelings. Learning that she can hold space for people without carrying them inside me afterwards.

She doesn’t want to stop feeling deeply.

She just wants to learn how to come back to herself after feeling everyone else first.

I think I’m her. The sponge.