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.
I can also smell food. Am I special too?
I doubt any of us could hope to be that special.
Who the hell says this ABOUT THEMSELVES?
But… how the fuck do you have any idea how intensely other people are feeling life, sweetheart? Perhaps they feel it even more intensely than you do, but also have some (wonderful, special, extraordinary) talent to feel even more deeply than your (shallow, vapid, inadequate) self – so while you are so wonderously overwhelmed, they are merely deeply satisfied?
I am reminded of Lady Catherine DeBourgh, and her self-satisfied pronouncement that she probably enjoyed music more than anyone else.
Oh – I hadn’t noticed that the whole episode was based on taking an internet quiz. Well, that’s certainly authoritative, isn’t it!
It is a bit much.
I would guess that setting yourself up to be the star of your own ongoing drama – say, by writing a regular column essentially about yourself, with yourself forever foregrounded – is a recipe for self-preoccupation and self-dramatisation. Which in turn seem likely to exacerbate any neurotic and/or narcissistic tendencies.
It also makes for some pretty tedious reading. For others, I mean.
At what point will she conjure up a theme song that plays in her head 24/7?
And where is God in all this? Surely by now she has tapped into the Divine Consciousness as she is so specially attuned to all of His creation. I mean, even Albert Einstein never reached that point, stating, “I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are just details.” She already knows she’s further along, if you will, than the rest of us so who’s to say Miranda won’t reach the Lord and be his bestie?
From the article:
I am wondering, if it were classified as a disorder, how soon before some busybody, he-doesn’t-know-what-he’s-talking-about psychiatrist says, “Oh – that’s just histrionic personality disorder.”
I am guessing that HSPs are overwhelmingly female.
The vast majority of cases, I believe.
Well, that’s certainly authoritative, isn’t it!
TBF, internet quizzes and WebMD are the gold standard for diagnostic testing, and BTW, is it just me, or is anyone else supremely tired of this need to be “seen” crap?
I see, instead of mirrors “50 times a day”, Instagram selfies, a sure cure for narcissist blues.
I went to Ms. Aron’s website and started the self-quiz on whether I am a Highly Sensitive Person. Even a few questions in, this is geared to someone just itching to exclaim, “OMG, THAT’S SO ME!”
Example:
“Do you notice and enjoy delicate or fine scents, tastes, sounds, works of art?”
Erm . . . that’s a little subjective and broadly stated. Why yes, I enjoy the smell of night blooming jasmine while also thinking Lou Reed’s cover of “This Magic Moment” with its big, dirty guitars is really lovely.
Here are the choices for your answer to the above:
Never
Minimal
Sometimes
Moderate
Often
Very Often
Almost Always
Extremely
Now, for the average person, the rage of “often,” “very often,” and “almost always” applies because that person is likely to choose to smell, eat, listen to, or look at something they like. Right? An afternoon at the Guggenheim for me is not going to be as enjoyable as one spent in the Frick. I don’t like beets so I will choose asparagus, which I do like.
And the question: Are you bothered by intense stimuli, like loud noises or chaotic scenes?
Are we talking about an EDM rave here or trying to escape from a burning building? Because yeah, if I am caught in, oh, say, the cross-fire of rival street gangs, I just might be a tad perturbed.
I notice Elon also has a book, “The Undervalued Self.” Now, I have not read the book but I could see how someone like Miranda Luby, feeling down, jumps to say, “That’s it, I AM UNDERVALUED” rather than admit, “You know, I could make these changes . . .”
Laughed, not sorry.
We’re gonna need more chairs.
Vivid and complex. Not at all like you.
I beg to differ. I read your blog about all these “interesting” folks you write about. Isn’t that vivid and complex enough?
It’s quite a burden sharing the planet with someone like this, but I bravely soldier on. Im special that way.
That is the thing, innit? Little does she know I am so superultrahypersensitive that I can smell music and I thought I had tinnitus till the online color test at the Oculist Reddit showed I was hearing colors I could see that are so far in the ultraviolet that even bees couldn’t see them.
Well, the top part surely is.
And here I was thinking it was just ‘getting drunk’ and ‘having a hangover’.
I would be curious as to what might be their percentage of English lit teachers.
When I was a mere seedling, “special ability” was a euphemism used for students of lesser aptitude. “Tracking” was not yet a dirty word.
HSPs are, I would guess, a pain to be around. They can hear you chewing. They are always either too hot or too cold. Food is rarely of high enough quality. Nor anything else. What fun!
There are objective tests for HSP. Some tests of sight and hearing calibrate whether people see or hear more than average; some don’t. One test that was supposedly favored in the eighteenth century was how many stars a person sees in the Big Dipper (THERE ARE EIGHT!) and the Pleiades (SEVEN!) without a telescope. Parents knew I was HSP (which is normal in my family, actually) when I was asked to read the lowest line I could see clearly on an eye chart and I squeaked “Copyright M-C-M…”
Or whatever. I don’t remember the episode myself. I was able to see printed letters well enough to read at age three. That’s NOT a reliable test of intelligence but it is a fairly reliable indicator of High Sensory Perceptivity.
The writer being ridiculed here does sound as if she belongs to a certain subset of the upper middle class, and as if her limited life experience is showing…but “super” perceptivity is real.
Let’s just say that I’ve not noticed many HSPs wanting to spend more time around non-HSPs, so no worries.
Btw, although our culture rewards HSP females for being Real Princesses about the things we can’t stand and rewards HSP males for demonstrating excellence in job-related skills that require sensitivity and precision, the trait is probably inherited by 20 to 25% of the population, male and female.