I’ve learned in my life that there is an enormous difference between sharing someone’s pain and bearing it.

Too often in my life, people in pain have used the concern of friends and loved ones as a way to avoid what they don’t want to feel themselves or can’t talk honestly about with others.

I wonder if I’ve done this myself, but I honestly can’t say, much of my past is murky to me. I know I did what I needed to do to survive, and I am not proud of some of it.

Curiously, people ground themselves by handing off their pain and sorrow to others. When the people around us don’t talk to us about our feelings or theirs, people like me tend to take in their troubles.

There are a lot of us; I have learned, many who will read this post.

I have a sick friend, as you know, and I’ve had this familiar feeling that I am worried about the reality and details of her life much more than she is.

She isn’t apprehensive about her mail or heating oil, I am.  If asked, she says it’s okay, no big deal. She does not talk about how she feels.

Someone will take care of it. This is familiar to me.

She seems disconnected from the reality of her life, leaving the crisis to others, even though the real suffering is hers.

The less she confronts her reality, the more the people around her pick up fear and sadness on her behalf. I think this is what the people do when they can’t be authentic or honest about themselves.

They need somewhere to put the sadness. There are lots of human receptacles around.

I understand she is ill, but I also knew this isn’t a new reality for her. Her disconnection from her own life left her alone and ill-prepared for life’s turns. It’s never evident to me how to respond to that; I grew up with it.

And I always responded by taking it in, I have always been a carrier of sadness. I think one reason I feel so close to the refugee children is that they never pass their sadness along; they bear it with grace and warmth. They don’t talk about it, but they don’t pass it along either.

In the Book Of Awakening, Mark Nepo writes that many of us are raised by well-meaning parents to be the carriers of their sadness and pain.

Often the one child who is softer than the rest, who is more sensitive than others in the family, is the one chosen by fate and life to deal with what no one else will deal with.

I was one of those children. So was Maria (but I don’t like to speak for her, she speaks beautifully for herself.).

We were both often called too sensitive, too fragile, too emotional, too odd, too much of a daydreamer.

“But as I grew older,” writes Nepo, “as life visited us with the hardships that life inevitably brings to all families, it was I who was needed to carry the burden of my family’s inability to feel. Without having my capacity to feel valued or acknowledged, I was the one to shoulder the family sadness with the brunt of my heart.”

I was touched by what Nepo writes.

In my family, no one ever talked about what was going on inside of them or us; I was presumed to be the one who would talk about feelings, I was the “soft one,” the storyteller and writer, the sensitive one.

I see now that in hiding from their troubles, my parents were passing the sadness along to me. I took in all of their pain and unhappiness, mostly because they couldn’t or wouldn’t.

It gave a powerless child a role to play.

I find that too many times, people in pain use the concern of loved ones as a place to put the suffering they don’t want to feel themselves.

Maria and I share this understanding that we bore the brunt of our family’s sadness and disconnection, and in many ways still do.

Since they will never speak openly or honestly about their pain and sorrow, it will never be easy to be with them or talk with them.

People often want others to hold their sadness and pain because they can’t or won’t take the risk to ask others to hold or comfort them while they are hurting.

They may complain, but they never risk being seen as vulnerable.

People like me often feel responsible for the emotional condition of others. This is sometimes seen as noble but is often more complicated.

It is never-ending and challenging work, this sorting out of what sadness is ours and what is not. Boundaries help me to find the lines.

People like me are often unable to stay within myself, so I become co-dependent, never able to rest until the pain and emotions of others are managed or attended to.

It isn’t real compassion that motivates me in these times; it’s the only way to calm my fears and my role as a carrier of other people’s sadness.

In one sense, this is empathy; in another, it is just my brokenness. If you can’t take care of yourself, you can hardly take care of others.

I believe I am responsible for my feelings; I need to write about them and speak about them in the open. That keeps me from giving my sadness to Maria or the other people in my life.

Sometimes I run too far the other way, isolating myself and withdrawing from most people – this is so easy for a writer to do. This legacy of sadness has affected my entire life, including my relationships with friends and family members.

The challenge is to listen to my heart without closing myself off to the feelings of others.  I often mess that up.

Let go, let down, or draw closer. It feels like a tap dance sometimes.

It’s one of the tightropes of my life. The legacy of sadness for me is to be sad or happy, but the sadness or happiness must be mine, not someone else’s.