it's okay to care too much

What I like most in people is a sense of heaviness. Some of my close friends are gregarious while others are shy and restrained, but all of them have big feelings and an incredibly complex inner world. If you opened them up and reached in you would never get to the bottom.

A while back my friend said that her therapist mentioned that she might be addicted to love. She found it to be a distressing thought. In turn, I reflected that I am not close to a single person who doesn’t have an obsessive, heavy relationship with love. I know that there are other people out in the world who think there are more important things, and I find that to be a funny thought.

These days, I try not to pathologize my own obsessions. I think you can guide where your attention falls, but you can’t fundamentally change what you care about. Renunciation and abstinence are ways of managing obsession, not a way of ridding yourself of it. Often, acceptance is what finally allows us to move on.

I’ve always cared too much about other people. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to hug my teachers every morning. I was so attached to them. Obviously, all the other kids were like, You are so weird. What is wrong with you? I finally stopped in third grade, way too late. I watched children’s television until I was a teenager—I was too attached to all the shows I like, characters like Babar and Clifford the Big Red Dog. Even now, I’m completely unable to be normal about a Waymo. I think that Waymos are sentient beings, not a person but kind of like a dog.

As a teenager, I was troubled by the heaviness of my attachments. I wanted to be able to shrug them off, to move lightly. I wanted to be cool about things. It’s funny to see now that what I find endearing about others is exactly their inability to be cool about things. I like people who care too much, who can’t stop caring at a reasonable interval. The best compliment I can give, and the one I give most to people I love, is: “You have a big heart.”

I have a big heart too. It’s been a long journey to learn how to manage it. When I think back to my childhood and teenage years, I feel frightened by my own vulnerability, my puppyish-ness. I remember being 13 riding the Skytrain downtown, starting conversations with strangers. They would say when I finally revealed my age, Oh, I thought you were 18. I was a kid who was so eager to cosplay as an adult, to volunteer for adult responsibility. Which I couldn’t handle.

While writing this I reread Rayne Fisher-Quann’s wonderful post The Pain Gap, and thought about how the problem with caring too much is that in most relationships no one else is truly accountable for your pain. You can love someone intensely, and they can, and might, just brush it off. Even if they feel the same way, they may not respond the way you want them to. That doesn’t make them a bad person. But it also doesn’t make you a bad person.

At 20, if I found myself caring too much, I would’ve shamed myself into the ground for it. Like, it’s my fault, I acted weird, I misjudged the situation, why am I still fixated on it… all this circular thinking that ultimately was focused on controlling the situation and rationalizing the pain. These days, I feel pretty okay with whatever I feel, and what other people feel as well.

T said this weekend that I give other people permission to be the way they are, and that made me want to tear up. Both because that’s how I want to show up in the world and because that’s a sign I give myself permission to be the way I am. To feel the love that arises naturally, and say I don’t feel it when I don’t.

I think it takes a lot of time to figure out love really feels like, especially a love that feels right. We carry so much that our parents unconsciously passed to us, and it can lead to us looking for love or validation in the wrong places. Just because someone is kind, or sweet, or smart, or compatible with you doesn’t mean they are capable of loving you in a way that feels good, or even capable of returning your love for them. Honestly, they might not even like you. That’s just a fact of life. But I don’t think people should be ashamed of getting it wrong. Getting it wrong is evidence that you’re still trying to get it right. Yes, it’s embarrassing, but it’s also normal and okay. For some reason (perhaps because I write this blog) I live a life where people confess a lot of things to me, and they always think they’re telling me the most horrifying thing in the world, and I always think it’s… well, not normal in the sense of average, but normal as in completely human. Your humiliation is everyone else’s, too.

I don’t have all the answers, and I get things wrong all the time. But I no longer fight against my nature. My life is filled with love, with deeply loving people, because I care too much. How could I resent that? My capacity to attach to others also my capacity to attach to the world.

Accepting who you are doesn’t mean you should stay in situations that hurt you. I advise people, both strangers and close friends, to leave relationships when I think their care is unreciprocated or they clearly are unfulfilled. I think that if you find yourself consistently directing your love towards places or people that don’t love you back, you should try to find healthier places to put it. But who you are and how much you care is probably not the issue. In our culture heaviness is often pathologized, but I think caring too much is the key to everything good in life.

I don’t know if there’s anything I believe in more strongly than this: People can find love that feels good to them, and they deserve to, and they shouldn’t feel ashamed for wanting it. Please don’t numb yourself out because caring is painful. Your capacity for sensitivity and commitment is the best thing about you.