You have spent most of your life being told you are too much. Too sensitive, too deep, too aware of things that everyone else seems to let wash over them.

And after hearing it enough times, from enough people, in enough rooms, something in you started to accept it. Not because you believed them, because it was easier to shrink than to keep defending something no one seemed to understand.

So you learned to hold things in. To notice everything and say very little. To feel the full weight of a room and carry it privately, because the few times you named what you saw, it made people uncomfortable.

You stopped trusting what you sensed, not because you were wrong, because no one around you was sensing it too.

And that’s an exhausting way to move through the world. Not the sensing itself, but the constant doubt about whether what you are sensing is real.

I carried that doubt for a lot of my life. Not about rooms or moods, about myself. I could see things other people missed, feel shifts no one acknowledged, hold truths that no one wanted naming.

And I spent decades believing the problem was me. That I was too intense for the spaces I was in. That something about the way I was wired needed dialling down.

The moment that changed wasn’t dramatic, it was quieter than that. Someone sat with me and said something I had just never heard before.

Not "you are too much." Not "you need to toughen up." They said: "Russell, you’re not over-sensitive. You are accurately sensing things that other people are choosing not to see."

And something I had been carrying for a very long time, just made perfect sense.

I think a lot of us are walking around with that same doubt. Wondering if the depth we carry is a flaw rather than a form of awareness.

Wondering whether the cost of feeling everything is proof that something went wrong, when it might actually be proof that something is working exactly as it should.

You were not wired wrong, just differently, and you have always been paying attention, in a world that rewards people for looking away.

And the heaviness you have carried from that, the quiet exhaustion of sensing more than you are ever given credit for, is not a sign of imperfection. It's the cost of a capacity most people don’t have, and few will ever really understand.

And... some people will, and when you find them, something in you will settle in a way that’s just not settled before. Not because they fix anything, because you won’t have to explain yourself anymore.

That matters. Quietly, deeply, it matters.

Russel Taylor
Art:Rene Magritte the evolution of thought