Yup, I'm a Crab

I've never really been one of those people to set much store by a zodiac sign. It used to bug me if the question after "what's your name?" is "what's your sign?". Really? I am not my astrological sign. Recently I've been doing some....soul searching I guess you could call it and learning a lot about myself. While looking at the personality traits of a Cancer I see that everything ever written about the Cancer woman is me. Seriously. Every. Single. Thing. This part really stood out to me though.

You are extremely receptive to your environment and the people around you,
and will often ‘pick up’ people’s energies, moods and thoughts. This ability serves you well; your intuition about people is quite often correct. Your knack of knowing people’s issues before they even open their mouths attracts them to you. The difficulty with this, though, is that you can tend to absorb their emotions — negative as well as positive. The emblem for Cancer is the Crab, a creature with a very hard shell which protects a soft interior. The crab walks sideways, which is how the Cancerian skirts around a problem until forced to take it on with gritty determination and a creative flair.

The part about being very intuitive is definitely true. But the hard shell and soft interior? That's not me AT ALL(sarcasm at it's best). This might be the best way to describe me! It usually takes a very long time for me to let people in. I'm not even sure if they realize this because to them they think they've already made it. There are a lot of layers to me and only when they see the depth of my personality and emotions do they understand that all this time they've been getting the shell. I feel like I have to do this because underneath this hard exterior is a sensitivity not a lot of people understand. Absorbing other's emotions is a great way to put it. When the people I love are happy, I'm generally happy right along with them. However when they hurt, I truly hurt. Sometimes I hate that I'm so sensitive. I think I'd rather be hard inside and out, but that's just not me. Another thing about Cancers is that we're loyal. Once you make it in my heart, you're in. The flip side to this is that I don't always let go once a relationship has passed it's expiration date. Reading all this is helping me in my quest to find out more about myself. The more I learn, the more I like me :)