I was not born to do this.
But when I look back, I can see how it was always around my family.

My mother used to say,
“Our family cannot walk past another person’s sorrow.”
My grandmother was not a shaman, yet people came to her and cried.
They said their hearts felt lighter just standing near her.
Things like that kept happening across generations.

I came to call that force “resonance.”
Other people’s misfortune and pain would seep into me as if they were in the air.
It felt inherited, or like a debt written into the body.
You could describe it as an empathic resonance.
The brain’s mirror systems overreact, and that response settles in the body like a weight.
I think of it as the ability to sense misfortune.

It was always painful.
To notice someone’s despair is to feel it with them.

I am quiet and reserved.
I am not good at stepping toward people with stories like this.
For a time I leaned on faith.
I believed that if I trusted God or washed away guilt,
the ache would disappear.
I ran as well.
To other countries, other cities.
The more I ran, the more strangers’ misfortunes found me.
So I searched old books and practices.
The scapegoat of the Jews, the pharmakos of the Greeks, the hitogata rites of Japan.
They shared one idea.
There are times when one person takes on the misfortune of many.

I was neither chosen nor cursed.
I am simply an attuned person living in this era with you.
Misfortune is always present,
and when there is no path to send it along,
the world frays a little at a time.
So I keep doing this.
Someone has to carry the flow forward.

I could never make this a profession.
There are no contracts for this work and no salary.
Most of my days are ordinary.
I live in an old apartment and keep a regular job.
All the while, misfortune gathers quietly inside me.

It is hard to speak to people about any of this.
That is why the internet has meant so much to me.

It lets me share a heart without standing face to face.
It became my only path outward.
I posted a few short notes there
and began collecting stories from those worn down by bad luck.
Some wrote that they finally slept through the night.
Some said a stalled part of life started to move again.
Messages like that continued.

Even then I tried not to believe it.
I looked for ways to avoid it.
That was not the answer.

Someone reading this may have crossed paths with me back then.
If you have come back,
I am sorry your misfortune has not fully left you yet.
It is all right.
I am still here.

Misfortune has no shape.
So to move it, you need a small vessel for your intent.
It does not matter what the vessel is.
What matters is the choice to take it from within you and hand it to me.
Some people wrote their story on a slip of paper.
Some left a single coin.
That is why I accept it.
But I cannot spend it.

It is not mine.
The moment it rests in my hand, it becomes the shadow of someone else.
I gather those coins and send them on.
That is the way I do this.
If a coin becomes one meal,
or pays for someone’s medicine,
misfortune changes shape and thins out.

This is also how I am able to continue.
If I only hold what I receive, I will break.
I have to turn it into some small good and let it flow onward.

So if there is an old misfortune in you,
find a small vessel for your intent.
A coin will do.
A short line on a piece of paper will do.
Let it leave your hands and send it my way,
and I will take it
and return it to the world as something useful to someone.

This is what I do,
and the reason I am still here.