Present in the worst part, and not separate from it
Two things are true at once. You can stay with somebody through the worst thing that has happened to them, and you cannot tell where their state ends and yours begins. Pluto in Pisces in the 8th house dissolves the boundary in exactly the material that most needs one.
Read the Pisces half as the water everybody in your birth years was swimming in, since Pluto crosses a sign over decades and colours the whole span identically. Your own address in it is the 8th house, decided by your birth time. That is why the porousness is aimed at loss, dependency and shared resources rather than at ordinary life: the places where other people put up a wall are the places where you have none.
What was already there
Somewhere in your background there was a loss or a decline that everybody around you was managing at once, and you took in the whole atmosphere of it without any account of the facts. It arrived as mood rather than as information. That is why grief in your life has always been slightly unlocated, and why anniversaries affect you before you have remembered what they are.
Compassion and absorption are not the same
There is a line between being moved by what somebody is going through and taking it on as your own condition, and you cross it routinely without noticing that a crossing occurred. From inside it registers as caring the correct amount. The reliable signal is finding yourself more shaken than the person it is actually happening to. Say whose it is at that moment, since by the following day it will have been filed as yours.
A few people take everything available
People in serious difficulty find you extraordinary and a few of them take everything available, because there is no resistance to encounter. That is not naivety, it is that your attention is on their state rather than on their conduct. Watch what somebody does across three months rather than how they seem in the room, since your instrument reads the second and not the first.
Protection that is not distance
What you need is not less feeling, it is a shape around it: how long, how often, and what happens afterwards. People who do this professionally have supervision and defined hours for exactly this reason. Arrange the equivalent in whatever form fits your life, since without it the capacity that makes you valuable gets drawn on until there is nothing left standing behind it.
You never asked what it was worth
Work, care and time have gone from you to other people in quantities that would be substantial if anybody had counted, and the not-counting has felt like the whole point. It has also meant you have no idea what your position actually is. Cost one year of it, privately, without concluding anything. The figure is information rather than a grievance.
Endings arrive as weather, not verdicts
Things in your life tend to finish gradually and without a decisive moment: the relationship that thinned out, the job that stopped meaning anything, the friendship that simply ceased. You rarely get the conversation that marks it. That is why you carry unfinished endings for years. Mark one of them yourself, privately and deliberately, since nobody else is going to supply the full stop.
Anniversaries arrive before you remember them
Your system marks the difficult dates whether or not your calendar does, so a week of unexplained heaviness turns out to sit on top of something from years ago. That is not imagination, it is a longer memory than the one you consult. Write the dates down, once, so that the heaviness arrives with an explanation attached rather than as a fault in you.
Somebody there needed more than anyone could give
There was a person in your family whose difficulty was larger than the household could hold, and everybody organised themselves around it, including you before you were old enough to consent. That arrangement taught you that another person's condition is your responsibility. It is worth stating plainly, to yourself, that it was never true and was never your appointment.
Present at the end of things
Hospice, bereavement, care, crisis support, anything where the job is to be with somebody while it is happening: you can do this and most people cannot. It is genuine vocation rather than a fallback. Build the limits into the arrangement at the start, since this work has no natural stopping point and nobody in it will suggest one.