When Sensitivity Looks Like Distance

Two poems about emotional overload, self-interrogation, and finding stillness

Poem #1

The Insensibly Sensitive

I wrote this poem as a quiet act of acceptance.
For a long time, the gap between who I am and how my actions are perceived bothered me deeply. I tried to explain myself, to correct the reflection others saw. But I learned something: the wrong people will always see only the side of the mirror that benefits them.

This poem marks the moment I stopped fighting that distortion. I no longer try to be fully understood. I accept my contradictions as part of my identity. I accept that sensitivity and distance can coexist. And I allow myself to be exactly what I am —

without apology.

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The Insensibly Sensitive

Am I insensitive?
Maybe I am.
I don’t watch TV anymore.
I avoid the radio. I run from bad news.
War, famine, suffering…
I turn my ear away from the world’s pain.

Funerals? I rarely go.
And when I do, I stay distant —
far from the cries, far from the tears.
I avoid places where sorrow sits.
I sit with the drinkers instead —
the ones who laugh, who loosen up,
who forget themselves for a moment,
who still dare to see life in color.

Insensitive?
Maybe.
My family thinks so too.
At ten, my mother almost died.
My father and brother cried beside her.
Too heavy,
too suffocating for the child I was.
So I used “fun” as a way to breathe.

No one taught me emotions.
I didn’t know how to hold them.
How do you manage what you don’t understand?
I didn’t reject anything.
I simply wore insensitivity like a shield.
Useful.
But heavy.

Insensitive?
Really?

I’m a classic Cancer —
hard shell, soft inside.
My own pain, I can drink it.
But other people’s pain chokes me.
My heart tightens,
especially when I can’t change anything.

I never knew what to say to someone hurting.
My heart just wanted to erase it all—
to fix it all.
But I didn’t know how.

Sometimes people don’t need a solution —
just an ear.
Just someone who doesn’t run.

Staying has a cost.
Some of us feel too much.
We absorb.
We overflow.
The world’s wounds become ours,
even when they never belonged to us.

I stay when I can help,
when I can hold the weight.
I stay when my presence
brings even a little comfort.
But I leave when it’s too heavy,
when I have nothing left to give.

Because the truth is simple:

I am insensibly sensitive.

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Poem #2

WHY

This poem was written in the middle of a mental storm.

A moment where everything felt loud inside me—frustration, pressure, anticipation, fear. My thoughts were rushing faster than I could hold them, pulling me out of the present moment.

I mentioned this state in my last Sunday reflection of 2025: that feeling of being flooded by what might happen, by what hasn’t been said yet, by imagined futures and borrowed anxieties.

Instead of trying to solve anything, I did something simpler.

I asked questions.

Not to find answers.
Not to fix myself.
But to slow the torrent.

This poem is an auto-interrogation. A way of naming the noise without judging it. And somehow, by asking instead of resisting, the storm softened. Clarity returned. Stillness followed.

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WHY

Why?
Tell me—why?

Why do you let yourself be overwhelmed
by things that might happen?
Why do you always imagine the worst?
Why don’t you smile?
Why are you afraid?
Why do you let your heart
suffer because of things outside of you?

Why do you think so much?
Why this resentment?
Why do you let negativity
poison you?
Why not stay positive?
Why aren’t you present
in the now?
Why don’t you leave tomorrow’s matters
for tomorrow?

Why do you let yourself be disturbed
by what hasn’t been said yet?
Why do you panic
over what hasn’t been done?
Why do you think so little of yourself?
Why do you act this way?
Why do you give so much power
to what others say?
Why do you doubt yourself
because of others?

Why are you so excessive,
so dramatic?
Why are you so sensitive,
so anxious?

Why this frustration?
Why all this pressure?
Why are you afraid of your ambition?
Why this constant urgency?
Why don’t you slow down a little?

Why do you tolerate jealousy?
Why do you give in to envy?
Why do you avoid your thoughts?
Why don’t you see the value of your ideas?
Why don’t you believe in yourself?
Why don’t you nurture your faith?
Why do you hide your feelings?
Why do you block your emotions?
Why don’t you listen to them?
Why don’t you let yourself be guided?

Why all this anger?
Why do you judge yourself so harshly?

Tell me—
why?

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🪞 Sometimes, questions are not meant to be answered.
They are meant to slow us down enough to breathe again.

Until next time,
Warmly,
Odel A.