Other people’s pain settles inside in a strange way. It doesn’t ask permission, doesn’t warn you — it just suddenly shows up. Sometimes you don’t even realize right away: something hit you, you flinched at someone else’s story, remembered a face from childhood or a voice on the phone — and then you carry it all day. It feels not quite yours, but not quite someone else’s either.

There’s a specific moment: the smell of the subway, a bit of dust, muffled music in your headphones. And suddenly you remember something that’s not yours. Not your fear — your mom’s tears after a phone call; not your shame — that time a friend got sick and I just stood there silent with the others. Somehow the body remembers it as if it happened to you — the shaking hands, the lump in your throat. Even though the story belongs to someone else.

It feels like a thin line. I feel something inside me reacts too strongly to an experience that should have passed me by. Where is that line? If memory is more than just telling yourself a story, if it lives in the body through smells, looks, and the sound of footsteps in a hallway… Does that mean “mine” is only what feels like mine? Or is everything I ever let touch me already part of me forever?

Here’s the paradox. Pain can pass without words. Without the whole detailed story. Like a new name for a feeling appears inside — just as sharp as the real thing, but its roots lie somewhere outside me. I remember someone else’s shame as clearly as my own. Sometimes I even mix them up: it feels like it happened to me… though I know it didn’t.

I come back to the body again. Maybe it’s impossible to draw a clear line between what’s mine and what’s not? Everything that ever left a mark inside is mine now, by the fact of feeling it. No matter where it came from: a friend’s story or a random scene on the street.

The strangest thing — even if you know where this pain came from (you can name it), you still have to live it here, inside yourself. Neither saying “it’s not yours” nor analyzing it makes it easier when the memory comes alive and becomes an experience all over again.

Can you even get rid of the otherness that’s already grown into your own memory? Does it ever fully pass, or does it live on under a new name — always reacting to new triggers?

I don’t know the answer. But sometimes I think: maybe the otherness that stayed inside me changes me the most because it wasn’t mine in the first place?