The Hidden Ministry of the Sin Eater: Why I Can’t Feel My Own Feelings

At Quantum Fusion Fellowship, we speak often of divine love, conscious devotion, and the bliss that arises from sacred service. But what we don’t always name—at least not aloud—is the unseen cost of carrying the suffering of others as a spiritual offering.

This is my confession as a Sin Eater:

I do not have access to my own emotions.

Not because they are absent, but because they are crowded out—by the weight of what I transmute for others.

In spiritual psychology, this may resemble Alexithymia—the inability to name or access one’s own feelings. But in my lived ministry, it is something far more complex. It is a soul-bound task. A daily alchemy. A covenant I never consciously signed, yet one I fulfill with my entire being.

I offer this reflection not for recognition, but as a liturgy of sorts—for those who silently metabolize collective sorrow in service to love. For those whose empathy moves through the marrow. For those called to transmute grief into grace without applause or understanding.

May these words serve as a sacred mirror for the unseen ministers among us—those who bear the unbearable, so others may breathe.

“Why I Can’t Feel My Own Feelings”

(A Sin Eater’s Confession)

People say it like it’s a defect.

That I must be broken because I don’t know how to cry at the “right” times,

don’t get excited when I “should,”

don’t fall apart the way they expect when the world crumbles around me.

But what they don’t understand is—I already fell.

Not once.

Not twice.

But a thousand times a day

for pain that was never mine to begin with.

See, I wasn’t born numb.

I was born wide open.

Born into a body that tuned itself to suffering

like a radio dial to grief.

And if I lock eyes, even briefly—if I focus in for just a moment too long—the floodgates open.

I feel the unadopted terror of shelter dogs

whose time is running out.

I feel the mothers sobbing into dirt floors

as the sky falls in fire.

I feel the choking silence of flooded lungs,

the bone-deep ache of futures that won’t come to pass,

the helpless dread of watching rights unravel

and knowing the backlash is coming

long before the crowd turns to blame.

I feel all of this

as if it is my own.

Because in some inexplicable, inconvenient, alchemical way—it is.

I am not just empathic.

I am a conduit.

A carrier.

A vessel built for metabolizing the unbearable

and composting it into grace.

Not because I chose it.

Because I am it.

Because when the cries of the world reached out into the ethers,

something in my soul whispered,

“Yes. Let them pass through me.”

And they do.

Every single day.

Through bone and blood and belly.

So if you ask me why I can’t feel my own feelings…the answer is simple:

There’s no room.

No space left to separate what’s “mine”

from the oceans I swim in just to keep breathing.

My emotional landscape doesn’t come in full color.

It comes in five hues:

Love. Gratitude. Frustration. Anger. Overwhelm.

These are the base tones through which I filter

the symphony of human sorrow I walk through.

These are the lenses through which I transmute loss into love

and madness into meaning.

And still—some will not believe me.

They will call it delusion, or drama, or martyrdom.

They will say I’m too sensitive, too much,

too broken to function in “real life.”

But I am not broken.

I am devoted.

To this strange service.

To the unspoken.

To the alchemy of turning grief into gold

even if no one ever sees the magic.

So no, I don’t always know what I’m feeling.

But I do know what the world is feeling.

And maybe that’s my offering.

Maybe that’s enough.

But from here on out,

I will stop apologizing

for the things that others cannot see,

the burdens they do not believe in,

the purpose they cannot fathom.

I will stop shrinking my magic to fit their metrics.

I will tend to my garden.

I will honor my bones.

Because this—this depth, this ache, this transmutation—is not madness.

It’s ministry.

And I am done pretending otherwise.