The Girl Who Feels Too Much

By Prerna Chandra · Wed Jun 24 2026

“Please, let’s go. I don’t want to be here.”

I am gripping my mother’s arm so hard I can feel her watch digging into my palm. We are two minutes inside a mall on a Saturday afternoon and I am crying, properly crying, without warning and no story attached to it yet. My mother is staring at me like I have just spoken to her in a foreign language she does not recognise, because as far as she knows, nothing has happened. We walked in. We are still walking in. Nothing has happened. Except something has. My chest has gone tight as if someone’s hand is closing slowly around it. The sound in here is not one sound, it is forty sounds stacked on top of each other, a child crying near the escalator, three different phone ringtones, a man laughing too loudly into a call, music leaking out of two different stores at once and refusing to blend into anything I can make sense of. The light is bouncing off every glass surface, off the floor, off a hundred phone screens, and none of it is resting anywhere. I can feel, with a certainty that has no language yet, that there are too many people in this building feeling too many things, and somehow all of it is arriving in me at once, uninvited, with nowhere to go.

I do not know any of this yet. All I know is that my body has decided, faster than my mind could weigh in, that I need to leave this building immediately or something inside me is going to break. We leave. In the car, I fall asleep within seconds, not the sleep that restores you but the kind that feels like a system shutting itself down because it has spent everything it had. I wake up an hour later in my own bed with no memory of being carried there, and I ask myself the question that will follow me for the next decade.

“Was I just being dramatic? Is there something wrong with me?”

To understand how I got to that mall floor, crying over nothing anyone else could see, you have to understand what it is like to grow up feeling everything in a room before anyone tells you what is happening in it.
I am the kind of person who cries at someone else’s sad story before they finish telling it. Who can tell, from across a dinner table, that my parents had an argument before either of them has said a word, just from the particular silence between their sentences. Who replays a classmate’s offhand comment from school all the way through the evening, turning it over and over, looking for the exact place where it was supposed to hurt and finding, somehow, that it hurts everywhere. My brother has a name for this. Dramaqueen, he says it like a diagnosis. Why are you like this, he says, not as a question but as something closer to an accusation, every time I cry at a film or flinch at a sudden noise or ask to leave a party that has gotten too loud. I do not have an answer for him. I do not have an answer for myself either.

My parents do not mock me the way he does. What they do is worse in its own way. They look at me with something I can only describe as pity dressed up as concern. My father sits me down once, gently, the way you speak to someone you are worried will not survive something. If you stay this soft hearted, he tells me, the world will not be kind to you. People will see it and they will use it against you. You need to build a thicker skin before it is too late.

I remember nodding at him like he had just explained a problem I could just go and fix, the way you fix a leaking tap or a flat tyre. I went looking for a thicker skin for years. I never found one, because there was nothing actually broken to repair. But I did not know that yet, and so his pity became my own. If my father, who loved me more than anyone, looked at me and saw someone who might not make it, what hope did I have of believing otherwise?That single conversation did more damage than anything my brother ever said. Because mockery you can dismiss. But pity from someone who loves you starts to feel like the truth.
I carried that pity for years, layered on top of every moment where my body did something my mind could not explain. The violent film I had to walk out of because one scene made the room spin. The crowded lane in the old city I quietly avoided, only to be told by a friend not to be a spoilsport, the word landing and staying for days. The afternoon at work when a colleague raised his voice at someone two rooms away and I found myself sitting on the floor of an empty pantry, breathing carefully, wondering what was so fundamentally wrong with me that another person’s anger, aimed at someone else entirely, could undo me like this.

Every single time, the question was the same. What is wrong with me? Why does the world move through everyone else so easily and crash into me like this, over and over, leaving me having to explain myself, apologise, excuse myself from rooms other people seemed to walk through without a scratch. It took years and one evening on a balcony with my mother before that question finally cracked open.
We are talking about something unrelated, my cousin’s wedding I think, when the mall comes up out of nowhere. I tell her I have been reading about something called a highly sensitive person, and that reading about it felt the way that mall queue had felt, my chest going tight before I even understood why. I try to explain what was actually happening to me that day. Not fear of any one thing. Just too much of everything, arriving all at once, with no door in me built to shut any of it out.
She is quiet for a while. Then she tells me she always assumed something had frightened me that day, a specific person, a specific moment, something with an edge to it she could have protected me from. She had never once considered that it might simply be the volume of an ordinary Saturday, all of it landing in me with nowhere to go.

“Sitting there, I understood that I had spent years asking the wrong question. It was never what was wrong with me. It was what is actually happening inside me, and why had I spent so long apologising for it instead of trying to understand it.”

I think about my father’s face that day, the worry in it, the love underneath the worry. He was not wrong that the world can be hard on people like me. He was only wrong about what needed to change. Because here is what I know now that I did not know on that mall floor, or in that pantry, or in any of the rooms I quietly excused myself from over the years. The world does not actually require a thick skin from the people who move through it with kindness. It requires the opposite. It requires people willing to stay soft enough to notice what everyone else has stopped noticing, and to keep showing up anyway.

I still feel the room before anyone speaks. I still carry a friend’s sadness home with me long after she has stopped thinking about it herself. I still cannot sit through a film that turns violent, still cannot walk into a crowded lane without my whole body bracing. None of that has changed and I no longer expect it to. What has changed is what I do with it.
I show up anyway. I take the harder conversation anyway, the one most people avoid because they cannot bear the discomfort, and I sit in it because discomfort has never been a stranger to me. I choose kindness in rooms where it would be easier, lighter, far less exhausting to choose indifference instead. I do the things everyone else does without a second thought, the difficult phone call, the honest feedback, the standing my ground, except I do them while also carrying the weight of how everyone in the room is feeling about it, a weight most people never have to lift at all. That is not the easier path. It is the harder one, taken every single day, by someone who could have chosen numbness instead and never did.
That is not a flaw asking to be fixed. That is strength wearing a disguise nobody bothered to recognise, including me, for far too long.

^{A note before you go
If a mall, a crowd, a raised voice in another room has ever undone you in a way you could not explain, you are not dramatic and you are not broken. Your nervous system simply takes in more of the world than most, including the feelings of everyone standing around you.
If you know someone like this, think twice before calling them too dramatic or weak. What looks like overreacting from where you stand is often a person processing far more deeply than you can see, and still choosing to show up despite it.}

^{And if you are the one who feels too much, stop asking why. You are not weak for feeling everything. You are strong for feeling everything and still choosing kindness anyway. That is your superpower. It is what makes you emotionally intelligent in a way that cannot be taught, only lived.}