From the Guardian‘s lifestyle pages, some exquisite sensitivity:
For as long as I can remember, I’ve seemed to feel life more intensely than many other people.
Being so special, you see.
I move through my days flayed open, exposed to the world. I can smell food, the ocean, flowers when no one else seems to. A beautiful sunrise will send me into ecstatic rapture.
It’s all rather high-gear, positively operatic.
Could anyone else feel everything all at once, I wondered.
Like I said, for an opening, it’s pretty rich stuff.
The one being so immensely special, so rapturous and ecstatic, is Ms Miranda Luby, a lifestyle journalist who “writes regular opinion columns… about life as a 30-something.” Which is to say, about herself.
Ms Luby was excited to discover that her immense specialness has a name:
The term “Highly Sensitive Person” (HSP) was coined by the psychologist Elaine Aron in the mid-1990s… The theory is that the HSP is more responsive to stimuli, processes experiences more deeply, is strongly attuned to aesthetic influences, and lives with a vivid, complex inner world.
Vivid and complex. Not at all like you.
I read everything I could about my newfound label. I signed up for an email newsletter for HSPs and treated it like a bible. There were philosophical quotes, photos of bookshelves and lush forests, discussions about the ache of being human. These were my people. This was me. I felt seen.
The last three words, I’ll just leave those there.
When not aching with her own humanity, Ms Luby likes to tell other people about how she aches with her own humanity:
I mostly considered being an HSP a gift. It charges daily life with beauty and meaning and infuses my writing with more depth.
As readers of the Guardian‘s lifestyle pages can doubtless testify.
But I also recognised its downsides and had sometimes struggled with the challenges of feeling everything so deeply. But now it seemed I need to protect myself, to curate my world, in ways I hadn’t even thought of.
Clearly, more self-absorption was in order.
The newsletter and social media accounts I’d started to follow told me there were things I could and couldn’t do. Things I must have to feel peace… They gave me a daily to do list, items such as “environmental scans” to avoid undesirable stimulus. There was a link to a hat with the word “overwhelmed” printed on the front.
At last, a special hat.
I became very good at privately rehearsing future events in my mind… If I go to those birthday drinks for too long then I will feel overwhelmed and I won’t have a good sleep, then I’ll be really tired tomorrow but my coffee will give me a headache, then I won’t be able to concentrate during this work phone call, and then and then and then. I listed my fears until they felt like facts, my thoughts pulling me along by a phantom leash.
Self-absorption, it turns out, comes at a price.
I soon realised that I’d created a mental cage out of my sensitivity, transforming it into anxiety.
Well, yes. Not exactly a plot twist, but modish, very now.
In recent years, self-labelling and self-diagnosis have become increasingly common, as people turn to online information, symptom language and identity frameworks to make sense of their inner experience. But experts warn this can sometimes be more harmful than helpful.
Such is the quest for specialness. Happily, Ms Luby tells us that she’s steered clear of any neurotic spiralling:
Over time I’ve learned cognitive retraining techniques and grounding practices… My nervous system may be wired a little differently but my attention is still mine to direct, and when I stop scanning the world for threats I’m more available to notice the sheer magic of being alive.
No identity-announcing hat required. Ah, all is well.
Ms Luby’s numerous accounts of her own remarkableness include what it’s like to have face-blindness and to be afraid of supermarkets, what it’s like to think you’re dying, and what it’s like to realise the “negative effect mirrors were having on me.”
Entirely unrelated to anything above:
Now excuse me while I hide the breakables.
Via Julia.
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