As someone who’s often felt sensitive to people’s energies since I was a young girl, I recently began to look more seriously into resources about what’s often called highly sensitive people (HSP)— otherwise referred to as empaths or empathic people.
Admittedly, I was a little skeptical at first to learn more and, as a writer and former teacher of creative of writing, my first connotation with the term empath was Octavia Butler’s incredible, dystopian novel, Parable of the Sower, in which the main character, Lauren, is afflicted with afflicted with hyperempathy syndrome, “a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.”