Learning to Name the Weather
When the room becomes the storm inside you.
It’s been just over a week since I disconnected from my latest toxic situation. The relief has been immediate and enormous, like finally stepping out of a room where the smoke alarm never stopped shrieking. It feels so good that I haven’t been able to dive straight back into writing about my first major burnout, the next post in my memoir series. I need this pause.
In the meantime, something else has been unfolding. I started speech therapy. My assignment from last week was to bring examples of people and situations that feel helpful versus harmful in social settings. On the surface, it seemed simple. In practice, it cracked open a whole vein of reflection.
I do best with people who are open, honest, calm, kind, welcoming. I can feel it instantly in my body. I struggle with those who are closed off, or where words and actions do not match. Cruelty, falseness, othering, shock for the sake of shock, all of these corrode my sense of safety. At family gatherings, it’s the uncle who can’t stop parroting political cruelty, or the relative who drops slurs at the dinner table. At work, it was the leader whose tears demanded my reassurance while my own needs went ignored. I can read intent well, but I cannot shield myself from the emotional storm it creates.
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That’s the part that stuck with me. I don’t just notice the emotional weather in the room. I become it. When the air is honest, kind, and gentle, I breathe easier. When the air is cruel, upset, false, or guarded, I can’t help but inhale it and carry it inside me. Clinically, this has a name: emotional contagion. In neurodivergent and trauma circles, it’s also called hyper empathy. For me, it’s both. My nervous system, tuned by autism and C-PTSD, picks up on every shift in barometric pressure.
This week I am sitting with that. Learning to recognize it, to name it, maybe even to say, that storm belongs to them, not to me.
The memoir will continue, the next chapter is waiting. But for now, this pause is what I need. Naming the weather is part of the story too.
If any of this resonates with you, if you have ever found yourself drenched in someone else’s storm, I would love to hear how you have learned to step back into your own sky. Thank you for giving me the space to pause between chapters.
Still contradictory.
Still happening.