Chapter 3: A New Way
I am a solitary person. Maybe I was born this way, or maybe I just became it; I am not sure. But even when I was little, it wasn’t to other people that I ran when I longed for comfort or connection. Instead, I would retreat to the forest around my childhood home. It was here, surrounded by a hundred shades of green, that I felt seen and heard and known. It was here that I was home. Perhaps it was my extreme sensitivity that drove me to become so solitary. I have always been highly affected by everything: food, environments, media, other people’s emotional state, collective energy, the list goes on. As a child, I assumed that everyone was this way and that I was just not good at dealing with it. So, as I grew into my teen years, I learned to repress what I felt and found tactics to numb myself. But this had many consequences, one being that I walked through life with an eternal sense of loneliness. It felt as though no one knew the real me. How could they? I was hiding, after all. ...