Here is a question that popped into my brain the other day:

Is there a difference between depression and being highly-sensitive?

If it causal? Can a person be depressed due to being highly-sensitive?

Does it matter?

If you know me in the slightest, you know that I’m a highly-sensitive person. This means a variety of things: I feel things stronger than most people, I’m affected by things that most people wouldn’t be affected by, and when things do affect me, it stays with me for a while. It also means that I feel other people’s feelings, and sometimes I even feel feelings of animals or non-living things.

Sometimes it makes me feel crazy. Often, I hate it. Sometimes, I love it.

I’ve learned that while much of my “depression” as an adolescent was clearly due to trauma, a chunk of it that still lingers with me today is due to this highly-sensitive personality I have.

Have you ever had something happen to you, and it makes you so upset or so sad that you feel like there’s a heavy weight pressing on your chest and you can’t really breathe freely?

That’s what happens to me, all the time, to the extreme, even when it’s not actually happening to me. It goes something like this:

I walk outside in the morning and the sun isn’t out. I feel the gloom and doom of the darkness and lack of light and color and it weighs on me. Each organ in my body is craving sunlight. On the drive to school, I am flooded by the feelings of everyone else in their cars. I feel their exhaustion, their sadness, their lack of desire to go to work. I hear a lone bird chirping and I feel sad for the bird because what if it’s all alone? I get a news alert that there was another shooting. My heart sinks and my chest contracts. An image pops into my brain of a loved one dying. I force myself to take a deep breath and instinctively shake the thought away. I know it’s just a thought, but what if thinking thoughts could make them true? [As an aside: this is where being highly-sensitive intersects with anxiety and OCD, and THAT is a post for another day] I finally get to work and a student walks into my office talking about how tired she is and how she did nothing over the weekend and home is not a fun place for her, and I feel her loneliness seep into the cells in my body. And…on and on it goes.

Now, look. I’m obviously able to function. This doesn’t consume me every moment of every day – if it did, I would be unable to do anything. I have learned about my personality and my sensitivities and my tendencies and I’ve learned to manage them. And I’m thankful for that.

But sometimes within functioning, it’s in this sad, heavy state. It’s working with my students despite the weight of the world on my shoulders. It’s playing with my daughter while I feel sad for the blades of grass we’re stepping on. It’s snuggling with my cats while a heavy cloud descends upon me as images pop up of all the animals who aren’t warm and safe and loved.

And I don’t know that I would call that “depression.” For me, at least.

(Although, labels are a whole other discussion. They have merit sometimes and they’re unhelpful sometimes and sometimes they just don’t matter because regardless of what you’re calling it, you’re living it.)

It makes me think of Glennon’s quote (eek, when do I NOT think of Glennon’s quotes): “You are not a mess. You are a feeling person in a messy world.”

Yes.

That’s exactly what I am. EXACTLY.

And I suspect many of you are, too. I suspect this is not a just me thing. Well, maybe the intensity is, but I would imagine others can relate. Talk about it. You’re not crazy. You’re not a mess. I get it.

You’re a feeling person. In a messy world.