Someone at a cash register of the bakery ruined your morning. Not because they did anything in particular. In fact, that's the fucking point. You felt the full weight of a person running on empty, going through motions they’ve stopped questioning, and you couldn’t not notice. That’s not inherent sensitivity. That’s high resolution. You process at a level most people don’t, which means even background noise hits differently.
What actually happened is you absorbed something that wasn’t yours to begin with and spent the next two days turning it over. Meanwhile the person at the bakery forgot about it before lunch. Your observation was accurate! The carrying of it, that’s all on you. But it shouldn’t.
How much of what you’ve internalised right now belongs to someone else’s situation? When did noticing that these things start costing you your own momentum? And where do you actually put this down. Not to suppress it, but as release from it?
The problem was never your perception. It’s that you’ve been processing it alone at full bandwidth with nowhere to discharge it.
That gap, between what you see and having somewhere real to take it, that’s not a personal failure. It’s a structural one. And it has a structural answer, outside of bakery.
