Prose by London-based writer and editor Samira Larouci, read aloud at Dover Street Market London on 21 February 2026 during Paloma Elsesser’s Backtalk London edition. @samiralarouci @palomija
“I come from a long lineage of profound emotional disorganisation.
In my family, empathy was the air.My mum and I share the same threshold for feeling.Empathy is our mother tongue.Self-love, its shadow.
For as long as I can remember, something in me has run hot. It hums. Sometimes it feels as if something is actually on fire — low and constant.
Being sad about yourself is too easy. Too simple. This is something bigger and a lot less flattering.
An ambient fog that follows me from room to room.A porousness that becomes almost embarrassing in its intensity.
A man alone eating a sandwich on a bench.An older woman tracing English words from a child’s notebook. A white cat with an infected eye.The shell I left behind because I couldn’t fit it in my pocket.The pillow I abandoned on the sofa because I couldn’t carry it.
Even objects seem to draw me in.
My aunts who spent their lives caring for elderly parents and never discovered what music they liked.My cousins back home who have less than I carry on any given day but smile more than I ever have.
Whoever — whatever — I encounter becomes entangled in this web.I assign meaning to the smallest gestures.
The way someone leans slightly when they stand — as if they’ve been carrying heavy bags alone their entire life.The crispness in a voice that suggests no one has spoken to them for days.The polite tightness in a smile that hides its burdens.
I notice everything.And it accumulates.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s a symptom of privilege — the luxury of imagining other people’s loneliness. But my mother is the same.She learned to give before she had anything to spare.
In our home, other people’s needs arrived first.
My parents grew up without running water.I was born here, preoccupied with the loneliness I invent. That is a good problem.
To have space outside of survival is a good problem.To live with consequence is a good problem.
And yet.
My empathy is both imprisonment and liberation.It narrows my life. It deepens it. It can feel like inherited vigilance — a generational muscle that never unclenches.Like terror clarified.A profound, and mostly pointless, level of moral awareness.
There’s something almost arrogant about believing you can feel on behalf of everyone.And something indulgent in carrying burdens that are not yours.
The older I get, the more that fragility settles into form.
Because the harsh glory of being alive is contrast.A pendulum between low-level sadness and an almost euphoric spectrum of hope still sits in my bones and spills out in moments of recognition.
The body blooms anyway.
And maybe this is the great construction project of my life — giving contours to chaos, staying open without losing form. Sometimes I still disappear into the discomfort of my own sensitivity.
But I carry the river without letting it drown me.