I remember the night. It began in aisle seven, beneath ceiling tiles that looked like they hadn’t been replaced since 1993, next to a half-torn display of novelty socks that declared “I’m silently correcting your grammar” while hanging sideways like they’d given up on the future. I was not on a spiritual retreat. There were no ancient bells ringing, no forest mist revealing universal truths. Just the hum of overhead lights, the screech of a distant cart wheel, and me, debating whether socks with tiny tacos on them qualified as a legitimate act of self-care.

For the record, I shop late at night on purpose. It is not a coincidence, not poor planning, and certainly not a symptom of time mismanagement. I choose the night. I seek the near-empty parking lot, the near-empty aisles, the near-empty everything. Not because I dislike people, which may or may not be only partially true, but because I can feel them. Not metaphorically, nothing cosmically spiritual, but physically. Like weather. Like a falling barometric pressure.

I’ve always known things. Not big things, not lottery-ticket things, but directional things. When to leave. When to stay. When to say something, and more often, when to pretend I hadn’t noticed anything at all. I have never openly advertised this. I carry stones in my purse because they are pretty, not because some voice told me to pick them up because they are magical. I do not dress like Stevie Nicks or introduce myself with my star chart. I live by my intuition, following it like it was a quiet animal that wandered just far enough ahead to never quite be caught. (I still have flash backs to the time the pack of wild javelinas were pacing me in the brush, but that’s another story for another time.)

That night, I felt something shift. It didn’t come with a big ballyhoo. There was no sudden tingling, no bolt of insight, no spiritual music swelling in the background. The lights didn’t flicker and there was no post-it note from the gods, telling me to pay attention. A man walked past me. He did not look up, nor did he speak. Just as it’s impossible to not look at a car wreck, I found my eyes wandering over to his cart; it contained off-brand cereal, one boot, and what I can only assume was a personal crisis disguised as a frozen pizza. It wasn’t my fault. If he didn’t want me to look in his cart, he should have filled it up more. As it was, it was all thinly laid out in a row, easy for my eyes to run all willy nilly over his future purchases. As he passed, something unfamiliar moved through me—not emotion exactly, not thought, but a kind of compression behind the ribs, a tightening of the space just below reason. The moment was brief, but it had weight.

I stood still. Something in me needed to recalibrate. It felt as if I’d walked through someone’s invisible weather system and emerged slightly off-kilter on the other side. For a brief second, I worried that my hair might have frizzed out because of the human-humidity that just passed me by.

Ten minutes later, it happened again. A woman, face expressionless but soul somewhere between “barely holding on” and “why bother,” turned the corner near the freezer section. As she passed, the air around her pulled inward. My stomach dropped, my hands tingled. Not dramatically, this wasn’t a scene from a movie. It was more like catching a frequency that wasn’t meant for you, but still enters anyway, like radio static insisting it has something to say.

It wasn’t exactly unfamiliar, I’d felt things like that before, little moments that came out of nowhere and hit me sideways. But this time it was louder, more frequent, and starting to feel less like a fluke. I knew I wasn’t a Madam Cleo, but this felt like something I wasn’t supposed to keep brushing off. I just knew, I needed to get out of there. I threw down the socks that I was holding. It’s not like anyone would notice a pair of socks mixed in with the freezer foods. I mean, it was Walmart after all. 

At home, I did what any vaguely self-aware person does when faced with an experience that doesn’t fit into polite conversation. I Googled for an answer. I typed things like “can you be psychic at Walmart” and “why do I feel weird around strangers” and “is it normal to cry in aisle seven.” The answers were unsatisfying. Most involved crystals, detoxes, or newsletters that promised to reveal my starseed origin for $29.95. None of them explained why a trip to buy socks felt like a slow-motion emotional assault I hadn’t signed up for.

Still, something had shifted. It wasn’t flashy or dramatic, but it was steady, like a light someone had quietly flipped on without asking first. I didn’t feel different in the obvious ways, but everything around me had started to register differently, like the volume had gone up on things no one else seemed to notice. I could feel people before they spoke. I could sense a heaviness in places where nothing had happened. Whole aisles felt saturated with moods I hadn’t brought with me. It wasn’t subtle anymore. It was consistent, and it was loud enough that I finally had to ask myself—did I just wake up in Walmart?

I did not suddenly become gifted, I did not suddenly become anything other than myself. But I do know, that in that moment, I simply stopped pretending I wasn’t already aware of what had always been speaking.

There’s a strange kind of intimacy in sensing the emotional debris of strangers, their quiet hope, their dull ache, their barely-contained resentment over laundry detergent that refuses to go on sale. It doesn’t knock or ask permission. It arrives uninvited, the way Aunt Flo shows up the night before a girls beach trip, or the way a late-night food delivery appears at your door, smothered in regret and congealed cheese. Sometimes it lands with the energy of my former mother-in-law: potent, persistent, and not particularly concerned with your boundaries. It settles deep into your thoughts like it’s paid rent, moves furniture around, and lingers longer than anyone asked it to. Nine of Swords be damned, there’s no way to take those swords and cut the thoughts out of your brain.

Yet still, I return to Walmart. Not because it is holy, but because it is honest. It does not pretend to be anything it isn’t. The walls aren’t beige; they are that blinding-in-the-middle-of-the-night blue that somehow makes your eyeballs feel like they’ve been overexposed. The music is loud and weirdly familiar, but only because it’s the same stuff they played in clubs the last time I went out, sometime in the 80s, remixed and repackaged like no one would notice. The energy is dense. The spiritual atmosphere hovers somewhere between abandoned mall and a first-level video game boss. And for that reason, for all its sensory offense and fluorescent chaos, it is the perfect place to notice what no one is trying to show you. It is the heart-beat of humanity.

Empathic sensitivity doesn’t care if you’re rested, centered, or even remotely in the mood for it. The ability to read energy, real energy, raw and unfiltered, rarely arrives when you’re calm and curious with time to spare. It tends to activate on the days you’re overstimulated and undercaffeinated, when your hair’s doing something unexplainable, and your outfit consists of whatever didn’t smell offensive. The sensations come in sideways, pressing into your awareness when you’re crouched in front of the store-brand dish soap, suddenly feeling heartbreak that doesn’t belong to you and wondering why your chest hurts near the paper towels. There’s no ceremony, no warning, no “Welcome, Sensitive Soul” sign. Standing there with just socks in your hand, a headache that isn’t yours, and a creeping suspicion that you might be absorbing someone else’s existential spiral while trying to buy breakfast bars. That was me in aisle seven, lit by a ceiling bulb so harsh it should come with a warning label, wondering when exactly I became a human sponge for collective angst and whether I’d ever be able to grocery shop without accidentally attending someone else’s emotional funeral.

Since then, I’ve developed a new kind of awareness. Not spiritual enlightenment, just energy reading in its most basic form. I walk into a room and feel the temperature of the emotions left behind. I sit beside someone in line and suddenly want to cry for reasons that don’t belong to me. I pass strangers and catch fragments of stories I’ll never hear. There is no skill to this, there’s only recognition and validation of human life. Thank goodness Walmart now offers curb-side delivery.

If you’ve ever had one of those moments, those strange, sharp, sideways moments where you feel something that doesn’t belong to you and realize the universe just handed you someone else’s unsorted feelings, then you know what I mean. If it has happened to you at Target while you were shopping for a better box wine and holding a rotisserie chicken you didn’t even want, then you know.

And if you’ve never talked about it because it felt absurd, because you didn’t want to sound dramatic, because you assumed it was just your imagination malfunctioning in public, then congratulations! You are probably psychic in the least convenient way possible. Tuned to the channel no one else hears, you are the one reading energy in a place designed to numb sensation. The key to surviving is to learn how to read the energy, validate it as it flows through, and then let it go. Many of us are here to witness the pain, validating it for those who are so deeply buried in the emotional oubliette, they just don’t know how to express it.

If any part of this feels familiar—if you’ve ever found yourself absorbing the emotional static of strangers while standing next to snack cakes—you’re not alone. Leave a comment if you vibe with this. We really should start a club. Nothing too organized, just a loose network of people who accidentally feel too much in public. Maybe matching jackets, that would be cool. Or at least a secret handshake or a sign we can pretend not to know or understand when people are around us and looking.  

In the meantime, I will continue shopping at midnight, reading emotions like warning labels, and trying not to cry in public while holding novelty socks.

Some of us awaken in ashrams. Some of us awaken in Walmart.

Both are valid.

One has better parking.