Tonight, I got to hear a beautiful person so courageously share a very traumatic story of hers, and I teared up. I teared up and felt a lump in my throat that I hadn’t experienced in a really long while. Not because I could relate. And not because of the details of the story. But because, for a second there, I could physically feel her pain inside me. I don’t know her, she doesn’t know me. We didn’t get to talk privately. But something about her words took me straight to a part inside me, where I found her. I could feel her pain even when it sounded foreign to me. I could feel the trauma. Not in the sense that I was the one going through it, but more of, I was experiencing it through her. So very clearly.

I still feel heavy inside, like I had been physically there, witnessing it happen. And I’m finding it hard to name this feeling. To understand it, as I feel it for the very first time.

Is that what it means to experience being... well, human?