High sensitivity looks like taking a slice of cake over to your elderly neighbour and then coming home and having to sit on your bed and cry for ten minutes because he had a bit of his dinner round his mouth and it was so hot in his house and because these things bring it home to you that he is very elderly and will one day be gone from this physical form and even though you barely know him you feel such a deep love for him and so you cry for the love and the inevitable loss.
It looks like, right before you’re about to go to bed, having a sudden thought about a starving child or species under threat on the other side of the world and tears falling to your pillow as you find sleep.
It looks like loving the world and every single being in it so much that there is a real, physical pain inside your heart.
It looks like being called moody, difficult, fussy, stubborn or highly strung, when more than likely you’re just highly overwhelmed.
It looks like flakiness when it comes to career and work because you’re easily bored and are interested in just about everything and are constantly pulled to explore new things and choosing just one thing feels like a death sentence.
It looks like people saying to you, ‘Wow, is there anything you’re not good at?’, whilst you yourself feel that you’re good at nothing at all.
It looks like being met with blank, confused stares when you dare to open up and express something about the way you really see the world and the way we live and then feeling totally alone because no one else seems to experience things the way you do.
It looks like desperately wanting to take care of everyone and knowing that you absolutely cannot take care of everyone and then feeling ashamed and guilty that you are taking care of no one.
It looks like having exceptionally high standards and being often disappointed that the rest of the world does not seem to have high standards, or even moderately high standards, or even any standards at all.
It looks like a constant search to find a way of crafting your diverse and unique gifts into a functioning life in a world that wants you to specialise in just one thing.
It looks like crying at sunrises, sunsets, bugs, birds, rain, snow, blades of grass, the ocean, the clouds…
It looks like having to get changed five times before you leave the house because ‘that’ item of clothing just didn’t feel comfortable.
It looks like needing inward time alone after every external event in order to process all the information that’s just entered your world. You need to join the dots and find out how this now connects to everything else because you know that somehow, it does connect to everything else.
It looks like having intangible gifts that the world desperately needs but doesn’t know it needs…yet.
It looks like having a deep drive to explore the big questions of life: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? Is there a meaning to life? Why do we suffer?
It looks like being told you’re too idealistic and for a while you think maybe they’re right and then you wonder why those people aren’t more idealistic themselves and why they seem happy to settle for the poor performance of the human species when you know we are capable of doing so much better.
It looks like assuming that everyone else experiences the world in the same way as all of the above when really, truly, not everyone thinks and feels this way at all.
My dear sensitive soul, my kindred spirit, my like-hearted friend, sometimes I have those beautiful spiritual experiences where all the labels we have disappear and I fall into that space where high sensitivity does not even exist and is not important at all.
And then there is this level, the human bag of bones level where we have all come here with different gifts and traits and temperaments. Here, at this level, high sensitivity is real and it needs to be cherished and honoured. And so I say I see you, I know you and I hope you know how needed you are, no matter how much the opposite it sometimes feels.
What you have are not flaws that need fixing. What you have are gifts that need to be given wings.
Love and courage,
Leah