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.
3 comments
Beautifully said!
Came here via Diary of a Mom, and am enjoying reading through your posts. I love this description of your brain! Sounds a lot like mine. I also appreciated your post about the autism spectrum, and being at the boundary of autism and NT, and you articulated something that I have been thinking a lot about recently. Autism is a part of my family and my genetics, but I do not think I am autistic, not like my brother or my cousin, in many ways I am NT. And yet when I read blogs like Diary of a Mom, and blogs by autistic bloggers like autistichoya, I often find myself nodding along, yes, that is me! Or at least part of me. As you described in your about me: I am a sensitive person, I have lots of feeling, and my brain is an interconnected maze. So I don’t feel I can claim autism or being autistic, but I am not completely NT. But as you say, it is a spectrum, not a binary, and we all fall somewhere on it.
I love hearing that you can relate! Remembering that it’s all a spectrum, not a clear black/white or yes/no helps me immensely.