My flowers beside me are dying and I feel genuinely sad about it, even though I know cut flowers are supposed to fade.

I feel bad when I break anything, guilty when I throw things away, and I once got emotional over that IKEA commercial where the lamp gets abandoned in the rain.

Now I can’t find my teddy bear because he was put somewhere “safe,” and instead of thinking like a normal person, my first thought was: “I hope Teddy can forgive me.”

Since discovering I’m autistic, I’ve started wondering if this is part of it — automatically giving feelings, personalities, and emotional weight to objects that other people simply see as things.

Maybe my empathy just spills outward onto everything around me, even old lamps, dying flowers, and misplaced teddy bears.