The Sponge

“Not all you absorb is yours to keep.”

A sponge lives to take things in.
Water. Flavor. Dirt.
It doesn’t choose—it accepts whatever it touches.
It never asks if what it’s soaking up is clean or toxic.
It just… absorbs.

Some of us live exactly like that.
We walk through the world with emotional skin wide open.
We hear a friend’s pain and it leaks into our own chest.
We pass a stranger in anger, and suddenly we are tense without knowing why.
We scroll through the noise of other people’s lives and carry fragments of their chaos inside our heads.
We are open pores in a storm.

At first, it feels like compassion.
Like empathy.
Like a gift.
And it is—until we realize we are heavy with what isn’t ours.
Until our thoughts feel crowded with voices that aren’t our own.
Until we start drowning in water we never chose to step into.

Here’s the problem:
A sponge that never gets wrung out grows sour.
Its fibers weaken.
Its shape distorts.
It begins to smell of everything it’s held onto for too long.
It becomes something it was never meant to be—a carrier of what should have been released.

You are not meant to hold it all.
You cannot keep absorbing without breaking down.
There must be a moment when you pause, grip your center, and squeeze.
When you press out what’s clinging that doesn’t belong to you.
When you remember your softness isn’t meant to be a permanent reservoir.

Letting go doesn’t make you less caring.
It makes your care sustainable.
It means you can show up again tomorrow without the weight of yesterday’s storms.
It means you can be present without being consumed.
It means you can love without losing your own shape.

The truth is:
Your heart is not a container for every sadness you meet.
Your mind is not a warehouse for every fear that drifts through.
Your body is not a landfill for the unresolved pain of the world.

You can listen without drowning.
You can witness without absorbing.
You can care without carrying.

So when the weight gets too much, step into the sun.
Let the heat draw out what you don’t need.
Let your fibers breathe again.
Let yourself be light enough to keep moving toward what matters.

Hold what’s yours.
Release what isn’t.
And remember—
even the gentlest sponge lasts longer when it knows how to dry.