Hi, I'm Jay, and I'm a Highly Sensitive Person
I Feel Like I Understand Myself for the First Time in My Life
Earlier this year, when I committed to listen to my body in a desperate attempt to crawl my way through the dense fog of severe post-viral fatigue toward healing, I had no clue that my body would ask me to give up, to some degree or another, violent entertainment, impulsive shopping, alcohol, added sugar, and a majority of my material belongings.
I did not, and still do not, aspire to resemble an ascetic or stoic. If anything, my mind's urges lead me toward becoming someone more closely approximating a maximalist hedonist. My mind has always had an insatiable curiosity for both learning and novel experiences. I now realize this tendency is common among people with ADHD, but part of me has long been drawn to and wanted to dive right into and fully immerse myself in, well, nearly any new thing I hear of, if only to understand what it's like.
As my mind has propelled me forward like a rocket, relentlessly pursuing its quest of understanding and experiences, my body has dragged its feet and whispered "slow down" in the background, probably for my entire life. I've often ignored it or even been irritated or angered by it, only turning my attention to it when it yells, meaning when pain, fatigue, or overwhelm becomes so extreme I can't ignore it any longer.
But months after committing to listening to my body daily — regardless of if it's yelling or whispering — I notice it still can't tell me much of what it wants, because it's often overwhelmed and can usually only name what it doesn't want. Throughout this process, I've been respecting my body's wishes out of faith that doing so is healing (hence the many things I've given up in rapid succession), but I still couldn't understand why my body seems to be so offended by things that so many people regularly enjoy without issue.
Until now.
Hi, I'm Jay, and I'm a highly sensitive person. That means I'm part of the 15% to 20% of people whose bodies have a lower threshold of tolerance for internal and external stimuli, such as lights, sounds, textures, touch, social interactions, emotions, and pain. Being more sensitive is a neutral trait. Although it might sound "bad" at a glance, it has its positives — high sensitivity often allows people to deeply appreciate the arts, empathize with others, and think about the world from a big-picture perspective.
Sensitivity is classified as a human trait, not a disorder, and the psychologist who discovered it, Dr. Elaine Aron, says its existence is more strongly backed by research than any other trait. (For example, other commonly studied traits are extraversion, agreeableness, and openness). You can find out if you're also highly sensitive by taking the Are You Highly Sensitive? quiz. Scoring over 14 suggests you are likely a highly sensitive person (HSP). I scored 27 out of 27.
Although high sensitivity isn't a disorder, HSPs are more likely to develop disorders, like depression or anxiety, because these types of disorders often appear after a person's nervous system has remained overstimulated for too long. Yes, that can happen to anyone as the result of trauma, but with HSPs, the story is a little different. Since HSPs are a minority group, most of the world is designed for non-HSPs, or people with a higher tolerance for stimuli. That means it doesn't necessarily take a major traumatic event to keep an HSP's sympathetic nervous system switched to "on" (though HSPs are likely also more sensitive to trauma, too).
We HSPs can become chronically overstimulated by trying to conform a world that wasn't designed for us, by trying to live similarly to the majority of people whose bodies are calibrated differently. Oooh. Suddenly, it all makes sense. Me being an HSP was the missing puzzle piece I needed to keep moving forward on my healing path. I still haven’t fully processed how this info changes both the way I view my past and my future, but I know it’s huge. Like, really, really huge. It affects everything, really.
I'll write more about HSP stuff in future weeks, I'm sure, but for now I need to spend time apologizing to my body. Yes, I've been listening to it for a few months, but I realize now that I'd not only been ignoring it, but straight-up abusing it for years, since childhood, really, because my thinking mind believed my body should act like the majority of other bodies. But it simply wasn't built like them, it never could've possibly acted like them for long, and I've been causing it great harm, over and over and over, because I didn't understand or accept this truth and kept pushing it to try.
I am liquidating my Etsy shop inventory! For the next month, I’m running a sale that’s 30% off 3 items, 40% off 4 items, 50% off 5 items, 60% off 6 items, and 70% off 7+ items. If you’re interested in postcards, stickers, or greeting cards I designed, check it out.
haha I scored a 20! who knew!