As the earth’s axis tips toward sleep, toward darkness, toward folding in and bedding down, I’m more than ready for the season of rumination, introspection, and cocooning. The depleted, tapped out feeling I’ve been sloshing around in all summer persists with more urgency, and I’m committed to rising to meet the needed replenishment, or in this case, more like folding in to meet the need.

Yesterday, I learned that some cultures believe that when a person chooses to do the work to heal trauma and pain, they heal not only themselves, but backward to ancestors and forward to decedents.

What a powerful and compassionate concept.

Healing can be many things—empowering, validating, soothing—but also grueling, heartbreaking, and devastating. I’ve never considered the choice to do the work to heal to be optional; for me, it was the only option. And I’m reminded of the words of an alternative practitioner from years ago, “no wonder you’re so ill, you’re trying to rid the world of pain.” I have since dismissed her words many times over in the context of our meeting, which had been in search of a remedy for the autoimmune disease crippling my young body. Telling me I had RA because I was carrying the world’s pain was not a solution and I resented her for it.

But the idea that I was bearing an outsized portion of familial and cultural dis-ease was probably accurate. From as early as I can remember, I always care deeply for everyone—even strangers (the first time I felt truly heartbroken and called to duty was at the age of four when I was initially able to digest the belief that the whole world was condemned to hellfire unless we were able to save them)—I felt their pain, anxiety, discomfort, disappointments and fear viscerally. And I just wanted to do whatever I could to ensure that everyone was okay. That incessant concern was an inherent ingredient in my very cells, a thing I’ve carried with me through every stage of my life and, at times, been ridiculed for, tried to detach from, and to fix—and the more I pushed against it, the more foreign I felt in my own skin.

I’m beginning to entertain that the whole destiny thing might ring truer than I’ve allowed, not from a divine ordination perspective, I’ve no need to pretend I know how or why things shake out the way they do, that is entirely unimportant to me. What does matter is that I do not struggle against my authentic self. I can carry the pain, the heartbreak, the disfunction and digest and transform it, especially if there is even an ounce of truth to the assertion that it helps to relieve the anguish backward and forward within the ancestral trajectory.

I am more than capable of passing it through myself, strong enough to examine the pieces and reassemble them in service to the people I love. If that is my role and my purpose, there is no reason to resist. It is an honorable destiny, insignificant in a materialistic power sense, but that world of visibility and recognition because of how aggressively I claim and dominate space is one I’ve tried and failed repeatedly to find a place for myself in anyway. And no matter how often I slam into the wall of dismissive arrogance for caring too much, loving too much, feeling too much, there is nothing left for me but to step wholly into it, into the only space where I have ever been my authentic self.

The world needs people who care too much, love too much, give too much. And yes, we can become depleted, but not if those of us who choose to fill that role take care of each other.