Tag

highly sensitive person

Lightly while deeply

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling.” (Aldous Huxley)

Someone posted this quote the other day and I keep re-reading it; particularly the lines, “Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.” This struck a major chord with me.

As a Major Feeler and Super Empath and Highly Sensitive Person (I made up most of those titles), it truly never occurred to me that I could feel in any other way but intensely and deeply. It’s just my wiring, and I have accepted and embraced that over the years.

But this. Wow. Maybe even though I feel everything deeply, I can just dip my toe in the deep feeling rather than going underwater and drowning. Maybe I can feel the fear or despair or sadness or disappointment but not step into it, not let it drag me down like quicksand.

And maybe for someone who isn’t wired the way I am, you’re thinking, “Um. Obviously. Just…don’t let feelings take hold of you that way. Why would you?”

The answer, of course, as I’ve written and spoken about so many times, is that it isn’t a choice. When you’re wired this way, you no less choose to feel your feelings than you choose to feel the wind or the sun on your face. So in a lot of ways, it feels non-negotiable, that there IS no control over it at all.

But this quote – I don’t know, you know how sometimes people can say something or you can wonder something, but it’s not until you hear it in the right way at the right time, and then it finally clicks?

I can feel lightly WHILE feeling deeply. It’s an AND, not a BUT/OR.

I can try, I won’t always succeed, but I can try to embrace it without letting the quicksand pull me down. I can feel it but stay in the shallow end. I can experience it but just dip a toe in it.

It just made sense.

Feel lightly while feeling deeply.

New mantra.

Sensitivity

I cried on my drive home today. 

I knew it was going to happen. 

I picked up the baby from my parents’  house because they have her on Thursdays and I couldn’t believe another Thursday has come and gone, wasn’t I just there yesterday, and my beautiful baby girl will be 5 months old tomorrow and it seems like  just yesterday that I was newly pregnant, and I love each moment with her but am I enjoying it enough? And time is flying and that is so scary and I try to live in the moment but it’s so hard and how long will I have with my loved ones and what if something happens to them, I will not survive it, what ritual or compulsion can I do to protect them, there isn’t any, I know this, and how do I just freeze everything so I don’t have to worry, and am I a good enough mother and wife and daughter and sister and friend and are my coworkers sick of me and is my boss mad at me, and my heart hurts for the world and for everyone else hurting and lately I’ve been feeling it all (again), feeling everyone’s feelings and feeling consumed by what doesn’t even belong to me and every sight has a feeling and every smell has a memory and there was a dead squirrel on the road and that did me in, and I am happy and sad and overwhelmed and stressed and tired and there isn’t room for all of those in my body and it feels like a million pounds weighing on me, and this is me and this is what happens from time to time but it’s a lot and I couldn’t reign it in. 

So I cried. 

This is part of why I used to not eat, or do other not great things around food. Because everything is scary and hard and I’m the epitome of a hypersensitive person and when all of those feelings and worries and questions became too much and the world was too big I could make it smaller by making it about food and calories and my weight. I could have that to focus on instead of gun violence and cancer and dead squirrels and anxiety and worry thoughts about my loved ones. Food and weight I could solve. Food and weight I could manage. The rest? Not so much. 

I remember how, as a young child, I had all of these same worries and fears and moments but I didn’t know what it was. I just knew I felt scared and overwhelmed and heavy and I didn’t know it was because I was so sensitive. I just thought something was really wrong with me. 

Nothing was wrong with me, though. I just didn’t know it. Glennon reminds us, right – “you are not a mess. You’re a feeling person in a messy world”. 

Right. 

But feelings hurt and worries are scary and everything IS hard when you’re wired this way. 

So sometimes you just have to cry, release the pressure valve, wipe your face, take a breath, and wait for the shift. 

Tangled

When I think about my sensitivity, my permeability, my inability to take in an emotion and let it go, and my inability to think/feel/remember one thing without bringing up ten other feelings/thoughts/emotions, here’s how I think about it:

I imagine that many people’s brains have maps of loosely connected events. Here and there, one thing is connected to another. So something may bring up a memory, but it’s a loose connection, and it’s only one, so they remember it and move on.

But my brain? I imagine it like a tightly knotted ball of yarn. A maze of interconnected everything, so that when I hear one thing? It instantly makes me feel every single other thing it’s connected to. Every single event in my life is connected to multiple other ones, so tightly woven that it’s near impossible to just feel one thing. Or think one thing. Or remember one thing.