When the World Feels Louder Than My Own Heart: A Reflection on Alexithymia, Sin Eating, and Sacred Service

There are days I wonder if my emotional silence is a failure.

Why I can feel the grief of a thousand strangers but can’t name the ache in my own chest.

Why my inner world echoes like a canyon while the cries of the world arrive like thunder.

This isn’t numbness.

This is alchemical overload.

This is the quiet cost of being a vessel.

As a Sin Eater and soul alchemist, I’ve long walked the edge between energetic service and emotional absence. Not because I lack feeling—but because I feel too much, too often, too deep. And to survive, I’ve had to adapt. Dissociate. Transmute.

In this post, I invite you behind the veil of my emotional world to explore the roots of what psychology calls Alexithymia, and what I’ve come to know as a sacred mechanism—one that allows me to metabolize the unbearable on behalf of the collective.

This is not a cry for sympathy.

It is a declaration of truth.

For those of us who carry the ache of many,

but rarely name our own.

“Why I Can’t Feel My Own Feelings”

(A Sin Eater’s Confession)

People say it like it’s a defect.

That I must be broken because I don’t know how to cry at the “right” times,

don’t get excited when I “should,”

don’t fall apart the way they expect when the world crumbles around me.

But what they don’t understand is—I already fell.

Not once.

Not twice.

But a thousand times a day

for pain that was never mine to begin with.

See, I wasn’t born numb.

I was born wide open.

Born into a body that tuned itself to suffering

like a radio dial to grief.

And if I lock eyes, even briefly—if I focus in for just a moment too long—the floodgates open.

I feel the unadopted terror of shelter dogs

whose time is running out.

I feel the mothers sobbing into dirt floors

as the sky falls in fire.

I feel the choking silence of flooded lungs,

the bone-deep ache of futures that won’t come to pass,

the helpless dread of watching rights unravel

and knowing the backlash is coming

long before the crowd turns to blame.

I feel all of this

as if it is my own.

Because in some inexplicable, inconvenient, alchemical way—it is.

I am not just empathic.

I am a conduit.

A carrier.

A vessel built for metabolizing the unbearable

and composting it into grace.

Not because I chose it.

Because I am it.

Because when the cries of the world reached out into the ethers,

something in my soul whispered,

“Yes. Let them pass through me.”

And they do.

Every single day.

Through bone and blood and belly.

So if you ask me why I can’t feel my own feelings…the answer is simple:

There’s no room.

No space left to separate what’s “mine”

from the oceans I swim in just to keep breathing.

My emotional landscape doesn’t come in full color.

It comes in five hues:

Love. Gratitude. Frustration. Anger. Overwhelm.

These are the base tones through which I filter

the symphony of human sorrow I walk through.

These are the lenses through which I transmute loss into love

and madness into meaning.

And still—some will not believe me.

They will call it delusion, or drama, or martyrdom.

They will say I’m too sensitive, too much,

too broken to function in “real life.”

But I am not broken.

I am devoted.

To this strange service.

To the unspoken.

To the alchemy of turning grief into gold

even if no one ever sees the magic.

So no, I don’t always know what I’m feeling.

But I do know what the world is feeling.

And maybe that’s my offering.

Maybe that’s enough.

But from here on out,

I will stop apologizing

for the things that others cannot see,

the burdens they do not believe in,

the purpose they cannot fathom.

I will stop shrinking my magic to fit their metrics.

I will tend to my garden.

I will honor my bones.

Because this—this depth, this ache, this transmutation—is not madness.

It’s ministry.

And I am done pretending otherwise.