An Empath’s Journey
Subtitle: What It Costs to Know Everything
Series: The Observer Series
The Knowing You Can’t Explain
When you are younger, you have this inner knowing — a sense of things you can’t explain and don’t know how you arrived at. As you grow, you are surrounded by other archetypes that put you in a position of self-doubt for quite some time. It’s almost like you split yourself into two people: the one who holds the higher thought of consciousness, and then there is you — the version people can actually talk to. This is the 3D version of you.
Being an empath doesn’t have an age. It’s more of an accumulation of knowledge through observation and experience. We often grow up surrounded by people who condition us to think in a certain hierarchy. This is my mother — she’s older than me, she knows best. This is my father — he knows best, he is a man. This is my teacher — I should listen, she knows more. This is my boss — he hired me, he knows what he’s doing. This position quietly lowers your self-worth and teaches you to question your own thoughts before anyone else even has the chance to.
Completely unaware, we automatically place someone’s age and role ahead of our own knowing. In all those relationships — the child, the younger sibling, the girlfriend, the boyfriend, the employee, the friend — there is some kind of preconditioned idea about how we are supposed to act. And most of the time, we never stop to ask why.
Until you realize that you are the one who is different. The black sheep. The one who, no matter how hard you try to fit the role, it never feels right. Or rather — aligned. And that misalignment makes you question who you are for a very long time.
Somewhere along the way, through interaction and conversation, you start seeing things differently. You start noticing patterns. The inner knowing becomes clearer. And somewhere in all of this, a third voice begins to emerge.
Unlearning the Hierarchy
One of the biggest misconceptions we carry growing up is the line — respect your elders, listen to your elders. And yes, there is truth in that. But not always. Not with everyone. Age alone does not make someone worthy of your trust, your deference, or your silence. Neither does a job title. Neither does how much someone gets paid. How someone carries themselves, how they speak, how they treat and respect you — that has far more to do with it.
Think of it this way. If you are a parent with an iPad child — let me take a guess — you never taught them how to use it, but somehow they figured it out and they know it better than you do. Does that earn your respect? Or do you tell them they spend too much time on it and to put it down? Or another scenario: your seven or eight year old is in dance or sports, and their technique is something you’ve never been able to do yourself. Do you respect what they’re capable of? Or do you quietly tell yourself you never got the opportunity when you were younger?
The point isn’t about the iPad or the dance class. The point is that wisdom and knowledge do not arrive with age. They arrive with awareness.
And this is exactly what makes the empath’s experience so disorienting growing up. You carry an awareness that the people around you — older, more experienced, more credentialed — don’t always have. And instead of being recognized for it, you are conditioned to be quiet about it. To defer. To doubt yourself. The work of an empath begins with unlearning that.
Theory, Practice, Integrate
There is no such thing as becoming a full empath on a timeline. Regardless of where you are, you are already here as an old soul. But each lifetime carries newer types of knowledge. Narcissistic behavior, for example, is constantly evolving — not becoming more obvious, but harder to recognize. There will always be new energies, new frequencies, new behaviors to learn from. Being an empath is more of a lifelong journey, and you are always in theory, practice, and integrate mode.
Where you need to set yourself apart is in the practice of detaching from what others say about you, and from who they are to you. Your inner voice and your higher consciousness will guide you here. There will come a point — maybe with a parent, maybe with a mentor — where the conversations stop expanding. Where you feel a resistance on their part that tells you they’ve reached the edge of what they’re able to give you. That’s not a failure. That’s information. That’s your empath awareness telling you it’s time to look elsewhere for the next layer.
The Empath as Observer
Empaths know when to use discernment. It would not be safe — or fair — to instigate a conversation when you already know how to direct it. Just because you are aware of someone’s situation and can see where they’re headed doesn’t mean it’s your place to take them there. Your position is one of observation. You see what you see for information purposes. For processing your own thoughts. For your own growth.
When do you interfere? Rarely, if ever. But you don’t have to — because you have already become their safe space. They know when to come to you. You cannot be the one to start asking leading questions hoping they’ll arrive at some realization. They have to get there on their own.
Like you did. Like. You. Did.
If you could do it, they can do it too. That’s what your frequency communicates to them. They just don’t know why yet. But this depends entirely on the connection you have with this person — and at some point, that becomes something you need to understand clearly before you decide how to show up.
Treating It Like a Business
Your connection with someone — when you are an empath — is more of a job. That’s how I look at it. A job, and also a teaching. When I see someone going through their growth, I understand that only after they have gone through their collapse is there even an opening for real help. And my cue to help is only when I am asked the question.
Empaths can’t lie. We actually don’t know how to. But part of the journey is learning how and when to communicate something. I speak freely. I act based on what I want to do. I talk about what I want to talk about. Even when I can feel something bottled up in someone else, even when I sense they’re close to something — I hold back. I wait. Because they will come to it when they’re ready. I’ve created the space. They’ll fill it when the time is right.
Most of the time they may not fully understand what I offer them in that moment. But that’s okay. They’ll remember it. In their own time it will make sense. They just needed to hear it. Because hearing something creates a cord of resonance — they just don’t know why it struck them until it does.
I treat my empathic ability like a business. I don’t take things personally — it’s all data. When I listen to someone’s situation I hear them, I see them, I watch their patterns. I follow the story as they tell it — how they tell it, what they choose to include, what they leave out. As they’re speaking I notice their body language. I notice what they’re saying versus what they’re not saying.
When they ask questions, I always respond with discernment. Because I understand that I can see what they cannot — what this situation is, and often where it’s going — and my response has to be careful not to trigger the wrong thing. I read how much they can handle. Are they still in denial? Are they lying to me? Or are they unaware that they’re lying to themselves?
That last one is the hardest to witness. Sometimes you know someone so well that something they’re telling you doesn’t quite fit their usual patterns — and instead of catching them in a lie, you realize they genuinely believe what they’re saying. They’ve been so conditioned by another connection that the distortion has become their reality. That hurts to see. Because you know exactly where it came from.
This is why empaths have to understand that when we enter someone’s life, we need to use discernment about the state they’re arriving in. That state was shaped by other connections — not ours. Our soul connected with theirs for a different reason. The purpose is to mirror. To look inward. To integrate the lesson and grow. Our job is not to intervene, help, save, rescue, or give away the answers.
The Message Inside Your Story
Giving people the answer to their problems — or telling them a truth they didn’t ask for and aren’t ready to hear — will only push them to prove you wrong. And in doing so, they lose focus on their own journey entirely.
I learned this in the most interesting way when I was younger. I had so many close friends — connections that ran for over twenty years. No matter how deep we got into someone’s relationship problems, it never triggered real change. In fact, they would often take the advice I gave them — advice meant for them, about themselves — and use it on the other person in the relationship that was actually causing the problem. Which is not the same advice. And it made things worse. Much worse. Because they never saw themselves as part of the equation. It was always the other person.
So we’d loop back. Every summer at the cottage, every hiking trip, every walk, every dinner, every couch conversation — the same relationship problem. The same health problem. The same motivation loop. We’d spend hours uplifting each other, feeling positive and motivated, and then — nothing.
Then I started noticing something different with shorter connections. The random people who crossed my path at exactly the right moment. We’d have one conversation, and somewhere in it, I would end up talking about myself — about what I was doing and why. I was never really listening to their story. I was sharing mine. And something in that would trigger something in them. Then they’d disappear. The connection would be done — not badly, just completely.
And then, sometime in the following year or even years later, we’d run into each other again. Unintentionally. And they’d tell me — Doriana, the last time we talked I was so inspired that I ended up doing this. I left there and I’m here now. And most of the time, I wouldn’t even remember what I said.
Frequency, Not Fixing
Here’s what I learned from that as an empath. Sometimes the clearest message is delivered directly. But more often, a message is more effective when it comes from you simply being yourself. Somewhere in the act of staying authentic and talking about my own life — and I’ve always come across as genuinely excited about it — people feel something shift. That frequency is what triggers the change. Not the advice. The frequency.
The point of being an empath is not to fix people’s problems. It’s to stay true to your own frequency and let the exchange happen naturally. Because if I am sitting there listening to someone’s excuses for why they can’t do something, what am I actually doing? I am absorbing lower frequencies. And that drains me. I get mentally depleted listening to people cycle through the same complaints. So when I notice that happening, I shift — I start talking about myself. And if I talk long enough about what’s true for me, they’ll start to feel the frequency of it. That’s the real transmission.
As an empath and an intuitive, the hardest thing to do is nothing — while knowing everything.
The best thing you can do is continue being exactly who you are. Keep learning. Keep absorbing. Don’t get pulled into the emotions of someone else’s story. You need to witness it — that’s part of your purpose — but you cannot intervene in someone’s path. You can see where they’re going. You can see whether they’ll get there. But you can’t decide that for them. The only thing you can know for certain is that they will make it — if they choose themselves. And you can only hope for the best.
This is also why writing became my medium. The people right in front of you often can’t see what you see. But someone reading your words — a stranger, someone in a completely different situation — will feel exactly what they needed to feel in that moment. The page becomes the safe space. And that’s where the message actually lands.
Soul Connections and What They’re For
When I was younger and felt an instant connection with someone, I was naive about what it meant. I thought it was friendship. I thought it would last. But I would eventually find myself becoming two different people — the version of me with that person, and the version of me without them. It took many friendships and many connections before I understood what was actually happening.
What I now understand is this: as an empath, you can see in hindsight that the moment a connection ended was also the moment you completed what you needed to learn from it. And as much as that’s hard to say — we don’t get attached to connections. Not the way others do.
But here’s the other side of that. I’m actually happy when a connection is complete. Because I know it means I’ve upgraded. I’ve graduated. And I know that a new connection is already on its way. So now when I meet someone, my first thought is — I wonder what I’ll learn from this.
What’s more interesting is that certain souls don’t just come and go. Some remain in your life but appear only at specific times — and once you’re at a higher level of awareness, you start recognizing the pattern in their timing. There is a soul connection in my life that I’ve known since I bought my first property. We don’t talk regularly. We don’t even think of each other most of the time. But every single time this person surfaces, I know it means a shift in home is coming. She’s a real estate agent, so on the surface her presence makes sense — but it’s the pattern of how and when she appears that told me the real story.
Or there’s a friend I’ve known since high school. We don’t talk often, we don’t see each other regularly. But when out of nowhere I get the urge to reach out — or they reach out to me — I know. I am about to go through a massive identity change.
These are not coincidences. These are soul contracts.
Where someone who isn’t an empath would call these people their friends, their family, their colleagues — for an empath, these are purposeful connections. There are soulmates, twin flames, karmic souls, narcissists, catalyst souls, and other empaths. They are all teachers. And the ones who affect you most profoundly are rarely the ones you would have chosen consciously. For me, one of those people was my friend’s mother, Antonette. I didn’t realize until much later that she was an empath. But I always felt something different in her presence. Now I understand what it was.
The Cost of Knowing
Being an empath gets lonely. The further you grow, the more you can see — and the wider the gap becomes between what you understand and what the people around you are still working through. You don’t judge it. You recognize it. But that recognition can be isolating in ways that are hard to put into words.
This is where life purpose becomes essential. This is where you take everything you’ve observed and absorbed and you channel it somewhere. For me, it’s storytelling. For others it’s music, or screenwriting, or building communities and organizations. The form doesn’t matter — the function is the same. We are laying the breadcrumbs. If we don’t branch out, people won’t know this exists. If we don’t translate what we see into something others can access, those inner thoughts stay buried — suppressed into anxiety, depression, disconnection. The empath’s purpose is not just to hold the knowing. It’s to make the knowing available.
From every connection we absorb knowledge — self-awareness, narcissism, karmic relationships, chakras, spiritual awakening, kundalini, consciousness, shadow work, grief, self-actualization, and so much more. In a way, we become therapists without the textbook. What makes our interactions different is that they are rooted in lived experience, not theory. And just like any professional who keeps their license through continuing education, empaths update their knowledge through connections. That is our training. That is our curriculum.
In other words — I get paid to exist. But that comes at a different cost.
No One Tells You
No one tells you that you’re an empath. Nobody grows up thinking — when I’m older, I want to be empathetic. Your life lessons get you there, if this is part of your purpose. You can’t go out searching for others who carry the same knowing — and that’s part of why you often can’t relate to the people around you. The path is mostly walked alone.
What you do notice is that you are constantly moving through lessons. And you know you’re evolving when the same situation that once leveled you no longer lands the same way. The connection is done. The job is done. Things fall away. A different opportunity appears — one you know you have to take — and you move forward carrying everything you’ve learned, expanding into new territory of thought.
The empath life is not conventional. Not by any measure. You are not running a regular nine-to-five. You are not building a business the way most entrepreneurs do. But if you’ve ever caught yourself saying — I’m always changing, but things always seem to work out for me — you understand exactly what I mean. The desires you have don’t look like most people’s desires. The life you are building doesn’t follow the usual blueprint. And that is not a problem. That is the point.
The Upgrade
There comes a point in this journey — after the real-world experiences, after the patterns and the lessons and the collapses — where something begins to embody in you. Words or phrases arrive that you either once heard and forgot, or that drop into your thoughts like a quiet download. Enlightenment. Peace. Sovereignty. Higher consciousness. These stop being concepts and start feeling like something you’re actually moving toward.
You may watch something about it. Read something. But here’s the thing — you cannot embody what isn’t part of your path. You can learn it. Appreciate it. Want it, even. But the empath stages are lived, not studied.
And all of a sudden, after months or maybe even years, you step back and notice how much you have quietly changed. You are more in control of your nervous system. You don’t get frazzled the way you once did. You are not silently angry anymore. You are silently peaceful. And you know you’ve genuinely evolved when the same situation from a year ago shows up again — and your reaction is completely different.
Learning to Let Go
Once you recognize someone’s patterns — and you’ve offered the same guidance more than once, and watched them cycle back to the same outcomes and complain about the same things — you have to stop. Stand back. Observe. And let go.
You cannot give someone the answer to a problem that is meant to be their own breakthrough. The moment you figured that thing out became your lesson. You have to move on from it. You are not the only one in the lesson — lessons are built with other people. And the most powerful thing you can do is become unavailable. Not unkind. Just unavailable. See if they find their own way. They need to arrive at the answer themselves. Because if you keep handing it to them, you are both stuck in the same loop.
If they are your mirror, start doing the opposite of what you normally do. And start with the simplest action of all — do nothing. If it’s something they can figure out on their own, let them. If you understand something better than they do, don’t give it away. Let them get there. Embody the version of you that has already integrated the lesson, and trust that the frequency of that alone is enough.
That’s the work. Not the talking. Not the advising. The being.
Evolving as an empath is not easy. And it’s worth clarifying something here — being empathetic is not the same as being an empath. Being empathetic means having a heightened awareness, a stronger sense of common sense and compassion in the 3D world. But in the world of empaths, the hardest part is something much more specific: separating your emotions from any situation, from any person, regardless of the outcome. You have to surrender to the idea that you also need to move on — from each person, from each chapter, from each lesson.
True empaths cannot judge anyone. Ever. No matter how much we don’t like someone, no matter what we know about why this person is the way they are — we understand it directly. We feel it at a soul level. And because of that, we cannot truly hate someone. The moment we consume ourselves in disliking a person, we lose access to what that person is actually showing us. We stop learning their behavior. We stop seeing the pattern. We step out of the observer seat and into the emotional one — and that costs us.
And as for the person you do have a deep connection with — no matter how many times they cry in front of you, no matter how much you can feel their pain — you cannot get attached to those moments. Because when you do, you become the place they come to when they need to feel better. You nurture the wound instead of allowing it to heal. That’s not what this is for.
Empaths must always choose themselves and their own inner peace first. We can feel for anyone — because we understand that what they’re going through is part of their journey. But you don’t want to be the source they run to because you give good advice. You want to be the source they can’t find — because you’re out living your life, choosing yourself. Let them find you there. Not the other way around.
The irony of being an empath is knowing the state of another person’s emotions, their triggers, their patterns, their unspoken thoughts — all while carrying zero personal judgment or opinion about any of it. It’s almost like mirroring no emotion back. It’s incredibly hard not to get pulled in. But just know this: staying in that neutral space is for both of your highest and greatest good. Always.
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