Running Up That Hill: Empathy When You Don't Feel Human

The Deeper Thinking Podcast is digitally narrated

For anyone navigating emotional intensity, neurodivergence, and the cost of deep connection.

How do we keep showing up for others without losing ourselves? This episode explores the cycles of empathy—its vitality, its drain, and its quiet power to heal. We move through the paradoxes of connection and exhaustion, especially in neurodivergent experience, where attunement can feel both sacred and overwhelming. This is a meditation on porousness, care, and the practice of self-compassion as a moral resource—not a luxury.

Anchored in the music of Kate Bush, Joy Division, and Bill Callahan, we reflect on how emotional resilience emerges not from hardening but from staying soft—staying near. We draw on insights from neurodiversity, empathy theory, and the ethics of care to ask: what happens when empathy becomes too much—and how do we return to it without collapse?

This is not a celebration of constant attunement. It’s an honest reckoning with the fatigue of feeling, and a slow reclaiming of inner life when the world becomes too loud. From overstimulation to emotional saturation, we explore how the struggle to stay open also reveals the depth of our humanity.

Reflections

This episode gives language to the invisible labor of empathy. It suggests that survival and sensitivity need not be opposites—and that burnout can be a site of return, not just retreat.

Here are some other reflections that surfaced along the way:

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Bibliography

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Empathy isn’t endless. But when we learn to rest, it can begin again.

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