You knew before anyone said it. You felt the shift in a room before it had a name, the ending before the sentence, the truth before the confirmation. There's a particular kind of loneliness in that – being fluent in something before there's a word for it, and having no one to check your translation against.
This was never overreacting. It was arriving on time to something everyone else was late to.
You weren't too sensitive. You were early.
Most of what gets called "too much" is really just timing. A feeling that arrived before the room was ready to hold it. And because the room wasn't ready, the feeling got handed back to you – mislabelled, made your fault, made into evidence that something was wrong with how you sense things, instead of evidence that you sense things well.
The Centre doesn't wait for permission to notice. It only waits for the right moment to speak. That waiting isn't weakness – it's the same delay that protects any truth that arrives before its audience is ready. You weren't wrong for feeling it first. You were just standing closer to the door.
If you've spent years being early to feelings other people caught up to later – the ending, the distance, the thing that was already leaving – that isn't a flaw in your wiring. That's the Centre doing exactly what it was built to do: noticing first, so that later, when everyone else arrives, you're not surprised. You're just finally met.
