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They Don't Even Know: A Poem on Empathy and Care
A reflective poem on empathy and secondhand pain — the weight you absorb when you love someone, and the private cost they never see you carry.
Sometimes you sit with someone you love while they tell you about a hurt they’ve been carrying, and you nod, and you say the right things, and then later that night the weight you absorbed catches up with you in private. They never see it. They were busy carrying their own.
She told me this story, and of
the hurt she had inside
I didn’t tell her, but that night
was the hardest I’d ever cried
It’s funny how we truly don’t
know
How someone can affect us,
and they don’t even know
The currency of close relationships is partly this — the willingness to take on a portion of someone else’s weight, quietly, without making it about you. They don’t have to know. The point isn’t credit.
But it’s worth saying out loud, even to yourself: we’re affected. The people who matter to us leave marks even when they think they didn’t. The care goes both directions whether or not it’s named.
— JTC