Crouched behind the shelf of Baby-Sitters Club books in the Van Hise Elementary School library, I sped through line after line of Anne Franks Diary of a Young Girl. When lunch came to an end, I tucked the book below crumpled sheets of cursive practice in my backpack, tried to remove the emotion from my face, and headed  for class. Age 9 and aware that I should hide my “sensitivity”, I had some inkling that my parents might be less than pleased with my literary choices. I didn’t picture their reaction as worried so much as frustrated, frustrated like they had been at my reaction when I was told about the war. My tiny brows had scrunched up and tears had  leaked onto my cardigan at the thought of soldiers dying in some abstract place called “Iraq”. My sobs of “They can’t be dying! How can I help them? I can’t let them die!” were met by a familial consensus that I really shouldn’t have been told, as I clearly “couldn’t handle it.” Following this  experience and many similar ones, I had started closing off my intense emotion, and so kept my growing horror at the genocide of my people to myself.

Hiding my emotions became more difficult, though, as thanks to my insatiable curiosity I soon found other books about the holocaust which depicted  more graphic scenes. In one, emaciated men stood with their backs pressed to fences, their eyes as empty as their stomachs. In another, shoes, suitcases, and other belongings unwillingly left behind were piled atop one another in heaps of thousands. But the image most memorable to my young mind was that  of a girl with short brown hair, a quiet, pained face, and deep brown eyes that stared back at mine. Nearly the only perceptible difference between us was the golden star of david pinned to her shirt.

Two months later, my mother came home with news.

“I’ve gotten tickets for you, aunt Ann, Nana and I to go see the play of Anne Frank!”

I froze in my seat, filled with equal parts dread and fascination. Although my reading caused me pain I couldn’t stop, I was filled with a deep need to try and understand peoples suffering as if somehow this knowledge could save them, and I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to learn more. In the following weeks my anticipation grew as I tried to prepare myself to be stone faced in front of my family. When the day finally arrived I spent the car ride running my fingers up and down the soft hem of my nicest velvet dress, chanting to myself “You will not cry. You will not cry. You will not cry.”

Three hours later when the house lights came up my mother looked over to find me sobbing silently, my hand quivering and pressed to my lips. The entire walk to the japanese restaurant no one could get me to move that hand and no coaxing could make me utter a single word as sobs wracked my small frame and my face turned from its normal olive tone to red and then a worrying purple.

Finally, on the concrete stoop of “Sushi Takara” with only my baffled mother and a homeless man in a down coat bearing witness, the thought I’d been wrestling with since opening the diary months earlier burst from my lips.

“I wish I could have died instead of her”

Survivors guilt, at the age of 9, had overwhelmed me. I couldn’t be soothed  or reasoned with; my intense sense of empathy had made it impossible for me to face  my privileged life when confronted with so much suffering. Staring into my mother’s confused eyes, I understood for the first time the weight of my distinctive sensitivity. I constantly absorbed the emotions of the people around me, felt first hand the struggles of even fictional characters, and the abstract sufferings of people I would never know hurt me as deeply as if they were happening in my own life. I didn’t have the ability so many others seemed to possess to close myself off from the emotions of the world. I was not a drama queen. I was not over reacting. I was an empath.