A Gift or a Curse?

“You’re not like the others, Emily. Don’t you ever feel it?”

The words echoed in my mind as I pressed my forehead against the frosted window, watching the snow fall quietly on the street below. My foster mother, Linda, stood behind me, arms crossed, her gaze sharp as icicles. I was twelve, and the world outside looked so peaceful, but inside, everything was chaos.

I had always known I was different. It wasn’t just the way I could sense other people’s feelings before they spoke, or the way lights flickered when I was upset. It was the loneliness that came with it. I was left on the steps of St. Mary’s Orphanage in Cincinnati when I was just a month old—no note, no name, just a hospital blanket and a silver locket. They named me Emily, after the nurse who found me. The staff said I was a miracle baby, but I grew up feeling like I was some kind of mistake.

My first memory is of Maureen, one of the older kids at the orphanage, snatching my teddy bear. As I tried to grab it back, something strange happened: the lights in the playroom burst, glass raining down, everyone screaming. After that, the other kids kept their distance. And so did the adults, except for Miss Anna, the head caretaker. She would sit with me after the others had gone to bed, stroking my hair and whispering, “You have a gift, sweetheart. Don’t let it scare you.”

But it did scare me. It scared everyone. That’s probably why my birth mother left me there. I used to imagine her—tall, beautiful, full of sorrow—standing in the rain, clutching me to her chest before walking away forever. Did she know what I would become?

Linda and Tom adopted me when I was ten. They lived in a sleepy Ohio suburb with neat lawns and nosy neighbors. Tom was quiet, always at work, while Linda tried too hard to be the perfect mom. She baked cookies, joined the PTA, and smiled until her cheeks hurt. But she never looked at me the way she looked at her own son, Brian.

Brian was everything I wasn’t: funny, athletic, popular. He was two years older and made it his mission to remind me that I didn’t belong.

“You’re such a freak,” he hissed one night, after finding me alone in the garage, staring at my hands. “Why can’t you just be normal?”

I wanted to scream back, but I didn’t. Instead, I clenched my fists and the light bulb above us popped, showering us in sparks. Brian jumped back, eyes wide. He never spoke to me again unless he had to.

School was no better. Word got around that I was ‘weird.’ Kids pointed, whispered, laughed behind my back. I tried to hide what I could do, but sometimes it slipped out—like the time I knew Mrs. Johnson’s dog was missing before she announced it, or when I told Coach Daniels his wife was having a baby, even though they hadn’t told anyone yet. People started avoiding me. Teachers gave me wary looks. I retreated further into myself, terrified of what I might do next.

Linda tried to help. She took me to see doctors, therapists, even a priest. No one could explain what was wrong with me. At home, she watched me constantly, waiting for me to mess up. One night, after a particularly bad episode—where I shattered every glass in the kitchen just by screaming—I heard her whisper to Tom, “Maybe we made a mistake.”

That hurt more than anything.

I started spending hours in the attic, pouring through old photo albums and boxes, searching for something—anything—that would tell me who I was. One day, I found the silver locket I’d been left with. Inside was a faded photograph of a young woman with sad eyes and a note that simply said, “Forgive me.”

I showed it to Linda. She barely glanced at it. “We’re your family now,” she said, voice tight. “The past doesn’t matter.”

But it did matter. I needed to know why I was like this. Why I could feel other people’s pain, why I could make things happen with my mind. I started searching online, looking for others like me. I found message boards full of people talking about ‘empaths’ and ‘psychics,’ but none of it felt real. I was still alone.

One night, I overheard Linda and Tom arguing in the kitchen.

“She’s not right, Tom! She’s scaring Brian, she’s scaring me!”

“She’s just a kid, Linda. Maybe it’s a phase.”

“It’s not a phase. What if she hurts someone?”

Their voices faded as I crept back to my room, tears streaming down my face. I knew then that I would never belong—not here, not anywhere.

Everything changed the day Brian got into an accident. He was skateboarding down the steep hill by our house, showing off for his friends, when he wiped out and hit his head on the curb. I was in the yard, and I felt it—the pain, sharp and blinding, like it was my own. I ran to him, knelt in the blood and gravel, and held his hand. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember the warmth flooding through me, into him. When the ambulance came, he was already sitting up, dazed but alive. The doctors said it was a miracle.

After that, Brian never called me a freak again. He didn’t call me anything at all. But Linda looked at me differently—like I was a stranger living in her house. She started locking her bedroom door at night.

I kept waiting for things to get better. They never did. When I turned sixteen, I packed my things and left. Linda didn’t try to stop me, and Tom just gave me a sad smile. Brian watched from his window, but he didn’t say goodbye.

I bounced from town to town, job to job, never staying anywhere too long. Sometimes I helped people—pulled their pain into myself, healed what I could—but it always left me drained, empty. I still wore the locket, still searched for the woman in the photograph.

Sometimes, I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d been born normal. If my mother had kept me. If Linda had loved me. But this is who I am. Maybe my gift is a curse. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. Maybe it’s just… me.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find where I belong. But I keep moving forward, hoping that one day, someone will look at me and see more than just the girl with the curse.

Do you ever feel like you have something inside you that sets you apart? Something you’re afraid to show the world? If you do—what would it take for you to finally embrace it?