All stories are bullshit

A few years ago, I wrote something about radical responsibility for my emotions. I published it, became uncertain about whether I had understood the subject deeply enough, and eventually deleted it. I think I was touching something true, but I was expressing it too absolutely.

I have been extremely sensitive to my surroundings for as long as I can remember. I experience myself as clairsentient. I can walk into a room and immediately feel that something is happening underneath the visible layer. Someone can say everything is fine while my whole body registers something entirely different. For most of my life, I interpreted this as feeling other people’s emotions in my own body.

I am no longer so certain that this is what happens.

I know I receive information from my environment. Some of it comes through facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, breathing, silence and the nervous systems of other people. Some of it I experience more subtly, as a vibration in the field around me. I do not need to know exactly what it is or where it comes from.

What matters is what happens when it meets me.

I receive information. It meets me. An experience arises within me. And from that moment on, what I feel is mine.

This does not mean that other people do not affect us. Of course they do. We are relational beings, constantly responding to each other. A sudden shout can contract the body before a conscious thought has formed. A child starts crying and another joins. Laughter moves through a room without words.

But being affected by another person is different from making that person the author of my inner experience.

Whatever reaches me meets this body, this nervous system, this history, these memories, beliefs and sensitivities. Something happens in the meeting. The experience is happening in me.

Looking at my sensitivity this way has made me understand something else. My sensitivity was not only a gift. It was also a survival mechanism.

I grew up in an environment where things happening beneath the surface were not always spoken about by their real names. When what is being said and what can be felt do not match, a child learns to read the room. Tiny changes in tone, silence, facial expression, tension and atmosphere become important information.

I grew antennae that could feel much more than was perhaps necessary.

And those antennae were not only sensing. They were predicting, for always reaching endless amount of information from the field, in the notion of ”keeping me safe”.

Something changed. What does it mean? Is someone angry? Is something wrong? Is it about me? What is about to happen? Do I need to soothe someone, change myself, become smaller, disappear?

The distance between sensation and interpretation became almost nonexistent.

Eventually there was simply too much information. When everything around me could enter my system and potentially require a response, it became unbearable. At some point I had to kill my sensitivity almost completely because I did not know how else to protect myself from it. I cut it all off and lived non-sensing for decades, until it almost killed me.

Now I see a third possibility.

I do not have to stop feeling what is happening around me. Quite the opposite. I can feel it, understand it, allow it to touch me, but I do not have to take it into myself.

Sensitivity increases, while certainty about interpretation decreases.

This feels like an important part of returning to myself.

I can feel a contraction in someone’s presence without deciding that I am feeling their anxiety. I can sense tension without needing to know who it belongs to. I can receive a vibration without immediately translating it into a story about what is happening in another person.

Hypervigilance needs to know. It scans the environment because knowing feels like safety. Mature sensitivity can tolerate not knowing.

Something is happening.

I feel it.

I do not yet know what it means.

And I do not need to.

This is where radical responsibility enters.

Taking responsibility for my emotions does not mean pretending that other people have no effect on me. Nor does it remove responsibility for how we treat each other. If I behave cruelly and hurt someone, I cannot escape responsibility by saying, “Your emotions are your responsibility.”

My actions are mine. Your actions are yours. We affect each other profoundly, but neither of us has complete authorship over the other’s inner world.

My responsibility is what happens next.

And very often, what happens next is a story: Someone does not answer my message.

My stomach contracts.

Then the mind begins:

They are withdrawing. I said something wrong. They have lost interest. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted this. I am being abandoned.

Suddenly I am no longer experiencing an unanswered message and a contraction in my stomach. I am experiencing an entire reality constructed around them.

The original vibration may be intense but very brief. What makes it grow roots and continue far beyond the moment is often the story. A thought creates another contraction. The contraction seems to prove the thought. The thought becomes stronger. The body responds again.

Soon I am no longer here in this moment. I have travelled inside a storyline; a reality constructed from memories, beliefs, assumptions and projections, and because my body is responding to it, it feels completely real.

This is where suffering can begin to extend its tentacles into a field that is no longer the immediate reality of this moment.

A few years ago, I participated in a Possibility Management Expand the Box Adulthood Initiation training. One exercise has become particularly meaningful to me in relation to this.

We chose an event from our past and told another person the story of what had happened. Then we had to tell the same event again from an empowered perspective, taking our power back within the story.

Afterward we were asked:

Which story is true?

My first answer was the empowered one. It felt right. It helped me. It returned my agency to me.

Wrong answer.

The initiation did not end until the distinction became clear.

Neither story was true.

All stories are bullshit.

It is a deliberately radical statement, and I still love it for exactly that reason.

It does not mean that things did not happen. Events happen. People make choices. Actions have consequences. Bodies remember.

But what happened and the story I tell about what happened are two different things.

“He left” can describe an event.

“He abandoned me” contains interpretation.

“I wasn’t lovable enough for him to stay” is a story built around it.

“His leaving taught me sovereignty” may be a much more empowering story, but it is still a story.

One can imprison me and another can liberate me. That makes one more useful. It does not necessarily make it more true.

This distinction between usefulness and truth has become important to me.

The mind is constantly creating coherence from fragments of information. It connects the present to the past and tries to predict the future. There is nothing wrong with this. We need the mind’s capacity to recognize patterns and create meaning.

The trouble begins when I forget that the story is a story.

There is a profound difference between:

“He is rejecting me.”

and

“I notice that my mind is telling a story that he is rejecting me.”

I do not need to suppress the story or replace it with a prettier one. Awareness simply allows me to see it.

Then I can return to the actual moment.

What happened?

What is happening in my body?

What do I actually know?

What am I assuming?

What part belongs to direct experience, and what part have I added?

My interpretation may even be correct. Sometimes the body notices something long before the conscious mind understands it. Sometimes patterns are patterns. Sometimes someone really is withdrawing, lying or behaving in a way that is not good for me.

Awareness is not naivety.

But discernment does not require certainty.

I can feel that something is not right and act accordingly without constructing a complete explanation of another person. I can say no. I can leave. I can change the distance between us. I can refuse a role offered to me. I do not need to diagnose another person or prove that my interpretation of them is correct in order to honour my own experience.

This is very different from how my sensitivity used to operate.

The child in me needed to know what was happening in other people in order to navigate the environment. Safety depended on reading the room correctly.

The adult does not need the same certainty.

I do not need to know exactly what is happening inside you in order to know what I am willing to participate in.

Also there is no need to know whether a contraction is your energy, my history, nervous-system resonance, intuition or some mixture of all of them. I can listen to it without turning it into a fact about you.

I want to be deeply affectable by life. I want beauty to undo me. I want another person’s grief to touch my heart. I want love to change the rhythm of my body. I want to feel the subtle movements of a room, a forest, an animal, another human being.

But I want to feel all of this from inside myself.

I can be permeable without becoming ungrounded. I can be moved without being moved away from myself. I can feel without making everything I feel into a truth about someone else.

Maybe this is why radical responsibility is not making me less sensitive. It is allowing me to become more sensitive because I no longer have to be afraid of everything I perceive.

I do not need to cut off my antennae. But I can use my discernment in the information recieved.

I can feel deeply and remain curious. I can perceive clearly and remain uncertain. I can listen to my body without immediately turning sensation into explanation.

Years ago, when I wrote my feelings are always mine, I understood it much more absolutely.

Now it means something different.

It does not mean that everything I feel originates entirely within me. It does not mean that other people do not affect me.

It means that whatever happens between me and the world becomes my experience when it happens within me.

And that is where my responsibility lies: Not in controlling the first vibration, but in noticing what I build around it.

There is no need to prevent the world from affecting me, but in refusing to hand the authorship of my inner world entirely to the world.

Not in becoming certain about what I perceive, but in becoming intimate enough with my own experience that I can distinguish the sensation from the story.

The world can touch me. People can move me. Life can shake me deeply.

Being an adult and growing up, in this sense, is not finally learning to know exactly what everything means.

It might just be about becoming able to stand fully inside myself, feel everything that is here, and no longer need to know.

Dear readers, Where, in your experience, does the information you receive from another person end and your own emotional experience begin? Do you experience emotions as autonomous, as something arising within you, or have you had clear experiences of feeling something that seemed to belong to someone else?

And what does radical responsibility mean to you in this context?

Can we be deeply affected by each other while still taking full responsibility for what happens within us?

I am not looking for a right answer here. I am genuinely curious about lived experience, especially where it challenges my own understanding.

This feels like one of those questions that becomes much more interesting when certainty is loosened and we actually begin to listen to how differently we experience being human.