I knew something was wrong before anyone told me.

Sitting in my first one-to-one with a new team member, I felt it in my chest: a heaviness, a guardedness, something held back. By my third conversation that week, the pattern was unmistakable. Every person carried the same weight.

They weren't just disengaged. They were still flinching from someone who'd already left.

A toxic ex-leader's influence hung over the team like weather. The hierarchy had changed; the emotional residue hadn't. I could feel it because my nervous system picked up the signal before my strategic brain caught up.

This is what high affective empathy does. It's not mind-reading. It's body-reading: sensing the emotional temperature of a room, a team, a person, before the data arrives. The feeling lands first. The understanding follows.

The professional edge (and its cost)

As a fractional leader working across strategy and operations (Mantage Ltd.), this sensitivity has become one of my sharpest tools.

I read rooms quickly. I notice when someone's nodding but not agreeing. I sense when a workshop is losing the group before the energy visibly drops. In mentoring conversations, I often know where the real issue lives before my mentee names it.

That team I inherited? Through weekly one-to-ones, I traced the shared disengagement to its source. I designed workshops and process changes that addressed what people actually felt, not just what the org chart said. Within months, morale lifted. Throughput increased. The team started doing work they believed in.

But this kind of empathy extracts a toll.

Difficult conversations follow me home. Other people's stress becomes my stress. I absorb emotional information faster than I can process it; and without deliberate boundaries, the accumulation becomes unsustainable.

Poetry as pressure valve

This is where my creative writing enters the picture.

I published a slim volume of poetry called *Getting it out of my System*. The title says everything. Poetry isn't a hobby for me; it's a release mechanism. The emotional material I absorb through work and life has to go somewhere. The page receives what my body can't hold.

My next collection, Earworms and Emotions, continues this practice. Here's a poem from it called "Today/Tomorrow":

Notice the layering. External weather becomes internal weather. The poem doesn't explain the connection; it enacts it. That's what high affective empathy produces on the page: writing that feels true because it came from the body, not just the mind.

The Ode Map: where both sides meet

On my Substack, The Ode Map, I've found a way to integrate these two modes.

The name is a deliberate pun. It started as a "roadmap" for publishing poetry: documenting how I apply strategy and operations thinking to the creative process. I showed poems in progress, discussed where to take unfinished drafts, and mapped the journey from idea to published book.

But the publication evolved. Now it's primarily about the creative process itself: sources of creativity, ways to tackle writer's block, and practical approaches to channeling emotional material into craft.

The Ode Map is where my strategic brain and my emotional sensitivity collaborate. It's where I teach what I've learned about converting feeling into form.

The trade-off worth making

High affective empathy isn't a superpower or a flaw. It's a trade-off.

The depth of connection comes with a cost of exposure. I feel more, which means I understand more; but I also carry more. The goal isn't to become less sensitive. It's to become more deliberate about when and how I open up.

In my professional work, that means careful boundaries and intentional recovery.

In my creative work, it means treating poetry as a practice, not just an outlet.

And in The Ode Map, it means sharing what I've learned: so others with this same sensitivity can find their own ways to channel it.

The feeling still lands before I understand it. That hasn't changed.

What's changed is what I do next.