Tissue Paper Heart | Self-Empathy, Healing & Recovery Essay

A deeply personal essay exploring healing, self-empathy, recovery, and the emotional journey toward self-acceptance.

I can’t save the world, but I can trust in the butterfly effect. My old therapist would say that a lot, about my healing. She’d tell me the work that I’m doing is inherently selfish, but it somehow has its way of seeping into the cracks of others around me. I never believed her back then. My reconciling with years of pain was messy, tangled, chaotic and incredibly selfish. Healing is a self-centered endeavor. No one has the motivation to heal for someone else. It’s why addicts have to establish their own stories of recovery, and initiative can only be generated by their egocentric yet determined desire to heal. I had reached my own version of rock bottom, a threshold, my edge,— where the only thoughts I had were “I can’t do this anymore”. In turn, I spent years looting through my own life, digging through abandoned messes, failing to find any sort of treasure. Instead I uncovered years of unseen mess and muck, the pulpiest pits of me. The pain, however, doesn’t last forever. My inner torment eventually lessened when I stopped evading the truth.

There’s something that’s changed about me that I didn’t expect— this healing has made my degree of empathy tearable like tissue paper. I will rip at anyone’s pain. I will feel deeply for their experience—simply because I gave myself permission to feel for my own. Before I arrived at that painful pinnacle, I was a hard-ass. I’d tell others to toughen up because that’s simply what I told myself. No time to feel. Being raised by baby boomers, it’s a common ideology. Suck it up, stop being a baby. Whether it was my experience or someone else’s, life was meant to be zambonied—-a little toughness can smooth anything over.

I don’t recognize that person anymore. I’m now transparent. A permeable membrane. An “empath”— even if I cringe a little at that hippie rhetoric. It doesn’t bring enough to the table. Transparency feels more true. There’s a ripeness in me, so sweet that it feels like I might rot. I not only feel my own pain— I will feel your pain too.

When I see ICE running through fields and arresting farm workers, when a big beautiful bill does no justice to language because it’s anything but beautiful, when greed is the status-quo, when our tax dollars are being spent on concentration camps, when children are swept away in flood waters which could have been prevented— my stomach has no choice but to do a tap dance. I feel like I might die because I feel an ache in my chest so big, so gargantuan, that it can’t only be my own experience but layers of everyone else’s suffering too.

I’m aware that I’m shouting into the void of

my own echo chamber, and those who support this heartbreaking monstrosity will either not see this or not read it. It’s near impossible to change anyone’s mind when it comes to morals and ethics. Everyone has their minds made up no matter what side they land on. What this administration has created lacks foundational empathy, but most of us know that.

These are damaged, broken men who have been running our country, and the world. They don’t give a shit about anyone else except for themselves. These policies are the equivalent of writing on tombstones. They claim to be religious, to worship a god of their own making, bending text in a book so they can fall asleep at night. They are forgetting about the hungry children, our elders, immigrants feeding their families in Mexico, the struggling middle class, millennials who can’t get a break. They have their heads buried in the sand with green dollar signs in their eyes.

The mark of any divine intelligence, god by most people’s vernacular, is to empathize with others— those marginalized, those struggling. To care for the planet, advocate for the environment, protect the ancient wisdom found in trees or the big blue. To embody god-like qualities, this divine intelligence— it’s not grandiose. It’s quite simple, really. If you want to be a decent human being, sometimes you dont start with others. Empathy is an inside job. You start with yourself.

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