“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
- John Green
Category
HSP
Trying to make sense of it.
Oh, my heart hurts so much today. I woke up and instantly felt a wave of “heaviness” come across me. I feel weighted down by all of the emotions in the world, all of my thoughts. It’s hard to breathe because of what feels like fifty-pound weights sitting on my chest, on my heart. I want to curl up in a little ball, like a little child, and nap for hours under a safe, warm blanket. I’m not sure what’s behind this. Sometimes, nothing is. Sometimes, it’s just how I am, and a day like that has to happen. Sometimes, I think that I overstimulate myself with so much sensitivity–looking at images that awaken my soul, listening to music with combinations of notes, or lyrics, that put energy and radiance into every limb of my body, feel the intensity of the sun shining down on me…and those are all good things. Those are all things that I need, I crave. But maybe it’s almost like what I imagine coming down from a high, whether drug-induced, or otherwise, would be like. Maybe that “high” I felt from feeding my body all of those intense things, is over, and now I just feel…normal? Maybe it’s a delicate balance. Maybe I need to moderate it better.
Or maybe I’m just in a not-so-great mood, and over thinking it, just as I over-think everything.
She belongs in the sun
Sometimes it scares me how much weather affects me. I love the high that I get from a sunny, warm day–the rush of endorphins that comes from feeling the sunbeams warming my soul, from looking up at the bright blue sky, from breathing in the beauty of the colorful flowers and grass. But with every extreme happy comes an extreme sad, which is what happens when the sun isn’t out, when it’s raining, when there is no color and life is grey. Most people respond to this with a comment like, “Ugh, I hate the rain” or “I wish it was warm out!” And I agree. But I respond, involuntarily, with crashing waves of hopelessness and sadness crashing onto me, into my body, into my mind. Once, in high school, I wrote in my journal, “The sun came out for the first time in two days today. I feel like a new person. No sun for me is like no oxygen. It’s like I haven’t been able to breathe in two days.”
That’s how I still feel, and that scares me. I so love how good the sun makes me feel, but it scares me that I can’t breathe without it. It’s hard that the intense wave of happiness is frequently followed by a splash of extreme fear, that the feeling will pass, and the sun will go away, and I will feel suffocated again. Oh, I try to live in the moment with the weather just as much as I do for anything else in my life. But it’s such a love-hate relationship, this dependency on the sun.
Sensitivity surrounds me
I am a Highly Sensitive Person. I also definitely have some sensory processing disorder components. That’s always made sense to me; if you feel physical senses very strongly, of course you’ll feel emotional ones strongly also. And, HSP “criteria” include both physical and emotional sensitivities. And, it’s incredibly common for individuals with sensory sensitivities/sensory processing disorder to be sensitive, seem emotionally disregulated, etc. So the first point is, it makes sense to me that it’s all intertwined.
And why am I bringing it up? Mainly because it’s a big part of my life. The fact that I’m so sensitive, that I feel things so strongly, affects each aspect of my daily life. Not always in a bad way, and I want to make that clear. Being so sensitive is a blessing and a curse, but overall, I wouldn’t trade it. I also have always been on a quest to educate others. Not just to promote acceptance, though of course that’s important, but it’s awareness that’s key. It took me years to find out key things about myself, mainly because I just didn’t even know those things existed, didn’t know what they were. Maybe if people knew more, they could save themselves years of hardships by obtaining that knowledge sooner. So if writing about these things helps even one person? Totally worth it.
I’ve talked about these things here and there with a few others, mainly those who Get It. But I’m not really sure how to just start explaining it, to explain the complex workings of my body and my mind. Where do I begin?