The Pleasures and Sorrows of Being an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person)
When I was a child, my tuition teacher would address me with the name, “Luddar”, which is a native word meaning, “dimwit” or “stupid”. For them it was a harmless word, but for me, it was anything but harmless. Why did she call me with that name? As far as I can remember, there were two main reasons.
- I was slow to grasp academic material, especially math.
- I was not ‘quick on my feet’
However, there was one thing I was quick at. And that was weeping. It was second nature to me. Where others were quick to laugh, I was quick to weep. And I grew up despising myself for being too fragile. After all, a boy can be anything in this society but not fragile. It is a social sin.
I remember, as a kid, I was once giving an oral test to my teacher about a lesson I had been trying to memorize for about an hour, and I forgot halfway. And before my teacher could scold me or say anything at all, I burst into tears. I burst into tears over my failure to remember. I tried to force myself to stop crying but I couldn’t. My teacher didn’t scold me because “A guilty conscience needs no accuser.” And I ended up saying something I remember to this day,
“I don’t understand why I am like this…”
And I ran away overwhelmed by shame and self-pity.
Crying was like sneezing for me, hard to stop. Today, I identify myself as an HSP, but as a child, I could not begin to understand questions like, “who am I?”. Being called, “Luddar” by my very first teacher is how my self-esteem began to shape. And my childhood, adolescence, and teenage is a sad movie, with many sequels.
And the effects of being addressed with demoralizing names still influence my self-image. Deep down, a part of me still considers myself “Luddar” to this very day. Despite having been presented plenty of evidence later in life to believe the contrary. Such as, I secured admission in the most prestigious higher education Institution in my country and completed an Engineering degree. No amount of similar achievements have been able to clear my mind of the self-defeating belief that I am a dimwit.
Here is the strange thing, however. In spite of living a life where I was addressed with heartbreaking names, bullied in high school, being shamed for little things like acne on my face and my thin physique, experiencing a paradigm shifting romantic betrayal, despite all that, I am writing this while completely convinced that I have received more gifts in life than I can fathom, and have been given more blessings than I can count.
Currently, I am in between jobs, but I am optimistic. At times, I have felt so utterly weak in my masculine abilities that I am guilty of falling in love with women purely because of their courage and resolve. It sure sounds like an embarrassing reason. Imagine loving a woman for possessing strength that you lack being a man. Loving someone because she can take a stand for herself while you can’t. Loving someone because she is relentless in believing in herself when you are full of doubt and quick to surrender in face of conflict. Loving someone because she is able to laugh quickly and find joy in little things, while you are a personification of sorrow and fear. I did recognize this pattern eventually. The cause of my romantic love was personal inadequacy, and not genuine admiration of what I saw. My love was born out of insecurity. I used to justify my motive for attraction by telling myself things like,
“I fell for her the day her face was lit by the golden light of the setting sun, while she was sitting one feet across me, looking into my eyes with intimate attention, without blinking, and asking me questions intended to establish a bond.”
Naïve, I know, but this kind of reason would be better than falling in love out of a character weakness, rather than genuine appreciation of beauty.
My traumatic adolescence turned me into an over-thinker. I thought too much, and people praised me for that calling me a “philosopher”, “deep thinker”, and “wise”. But in this regard, I have come to wholeheartedly believe what Dostoyevsky said,
“Thinking too much, I maintain, is a sickness.”
Sometimes, in an attempt to escape from a sickness, we give ourselves away to a different sickness. And this what happened with me. To protect myself from committing actions that had even the slightest chance of inviting offence, I started thinking too much. So much so that I lived all my days inside my head; plotting, analyzing, planning. I was disconnected from reality. Thinking allows you to find deep insights, but at a terrible cost. And so, I started appearing, “Wise” to people. But in all honesty, I was “wise” because I was afraid. I was “wise” because I was traumatized. People admired me but I was unable to enjoy life. What good is that wisdom that deprives you of the ability to laugh foolishly? If your wisdom hinders your ability to love and recognize beauty in life around you and feel at ease, then let yourself question that wisdom.
Thinking too much comes at a cost that is often too great. You constantly fall into analysis-paralysis. You start evaluating and calculating actions that should be free from conscious effort or logical reasoning. That should come naturally and effortlessly to you, like laughter, like disgust, like romance. But that is often a genuine struggle of highly sensitive people. Measuring every decision in the balance of ‘should I’ and ‘should I not’ is painfully exhausting. It is maddening to ‘think’ about whether to laugh or not, or worry about the delivery of your speech, and being ‘on the edge’ while in public. Social anxiety ruins you. You live so close to fear that you fail to notice beautiful things around you.
A few days ago, I talked to my mother on video call, and I hadn’t seen her in 3 months. I noticed her hair had started turning white, and the wrinkles on her face had become noticeable, and she was asking, “Which of your warm clothes should I dispatch for you? It is cold in your city and you need to keep yourself warm.” I phased out from what she was saying and was focused on her eyes and concerned old face. Looking at her while she was talking, I wanted to cry. How sad is it that the most precious things in life continue to get old, weaken and you can do nothing to stop it. This is a tragedy of life; all beauty must come to an end. And at the same time, this is also the driving force of compassion in us. We haste to embrace only because we know we are short on time. We cherish because we have known loss. Children, Parents, Spouse, Siblings, Friends… everyone tastes death. So, Beauty and Joy, I emphasize, are the children of grief.
And as a highly sensitive person, you do not need to despair. With the heightened sensitivity to sorrow, our ability to experience joy is also multiplied manifold. And that is what paves our way to become artists, intellectuals and poets. Can you imagine a World without those? It is true that the World might never understand the emotional burden we live under, but at the same time, the World will also never know the depths of joy our hearts are capable of reaching.
Carl Jung said,
“In order for a tree to reach the heaven, its roots must reach down to Hell.”
I believe HSPs are those trees.
Our roots go down to hell, but branches touch the heaven.
So do not be ashamed of your sensitive nature. Because as long as HSPs are there, the World will not starve of compassion and empathy. We will always make sure of it. And we will be each other’s support group, beyond borders and races. We will be there for each other in joy and grief, in health and sickness… in loneliness and love.