hypersensitive ovenbird I am told that this is what I am. It has rarely been seen as a good thing. On the spectrum of sensitivity we are supposed to fall in the middle, neither numb or too open to the world. But if you have to err on one side or the other it is perceived as better to fall on the side of numbness. We might call it stoicism. We might call it strength. We might call it resilience. But the bottom line is that it is better to feel nothing than to feel too much. Being “too sensitive” is inconvenient for others who must bear witness to your shifting emotional landscape. If you express great joy it might be temporarily acceptable but if you express deep sorrow you will be told to medicate yourself until you return to a “normal” baseline. You are not supposed to weep over dead spiders who you saw as friends. You are not supposed to grieve any losses for more than a few months. You are not supposed to wander around with a beautiful ache in your chest all the time. You should not need earplugs to survive a social gathering or motherhood or a concert. You are wrong, the world tells you. You are too much. Your sensitivity is a weakness that must be expunged. You need to toughen up to survive. You take things too personally. But what if sensitivity is essential for wholeness and healing? Martine Frossard explores this question in her animated short film “Hypersensitive” produced by Marc Bertrand with the National Film Board of Canada. It’s only six minutes long but manages to express exactly what it feels like to be deeply sensitive in a world that is built for distance, order, and control rather than wild organic feeling. A woman navigates a nightmarish world in which everything is too loud, too busy, too overwhelming. Twigs keep sprouting from her hair, a symbolic connection to the natural world and her own quiet, sensitive spirit, but they are cruelly trimmed away with scissors. She even tries to trim them away herself in a desperate attempt to be what the world wants her to be. But it’s only when she gives in to her most essential self that she experiences growth, peace, and connection. She waters her own roots with tears which struck me as such a powerful acknowledgement: in experiencing the full range of our emotions we build capacity for healing. The woman’s tears bring relief and release. She becomes a tree, wild, leafy, growing organically against the grain of a bare forest planted in strict rows. Raze, something about the imagery reminded me of yesterday’s half asleep poem, a_safe_kind_of_darkness. The last line, in particular, felt resonant: “each step takes us/wilder from weirdness.” If you set this against the film’s overarching themes it says something about the way deep sensitivity is seen as a “weirdness,” something to be overcome or stamped out or fixed. But emotional responses to the world are interconnected with our wild souls. Emotion is instinct, it allows us to build strong bonds with other people, it allows us to know ourselves intimately. Moving toward that wild place instead of away from it means meeting yourself with compassion. I sometimes still wonder if there’s something wrong with me. I wonder if I should be medicating myself in order to reach a place of greater stability. I wonder if I’m inconveniencing the people around me with the treacherous mountains and valleys of my emotional landscape. But more often, as I age, I find I can nourish my own roots with my tears, whether they stem from joy, or beauty, or nostalgia, or grief. What if it was all allowed? What if we became a wildwood and foxes ran in our shadows? 260212 ... ancasa.reyn I become familiar with this term as it relates to human beings' emotions about a year and a half ago when I came across the French singer Zaho de Sagazan. Her song "La symphonie des éclairs" is somewhat of a tribute to hypersensitivity. 260212 ... ovenbird Oh! Thank you for that. I'll have to look that up. 260212 ... ovenbird I did have a listen (and looked up an english translation of the lyrics) and that's such a perfect expression of the exact idea being explored in the short film--tears and challenging emotions are valid and necessary and just as worthy of being the subject of various art forms as joy. Thank you for pointing it out ancasa.reyn! 260212 ... raze as someone who spent a whole lot of years being told i was too sensitive by people who weren't sensitive enough, to say all of this resonates would be a bit like saying, "winter in ontario is sometimes slightly cold." and i think that short film is an excellent example of the way a complete story can be spun inside a very small pocket of time. six minutes, when they're meaningful, can feel as deep and as dense as a lifetime. in a recent interview, the filmmaker said, "being sensitive is simply being alive." that's just it, isn't it? 260212 ... ovenbird It strikes me as strange, too, how we tend to see hypersensitivity as a problem but not so much hyposensitivity. Maybe the very far end of that spectrum is psychopathy? But I see that as a little different. Hyposensitivity can happen in spectrum disorders like autism and ADHD, and can lead people to seek extreme sensory input, and that can clearly have challenging repercussions. But in contexts where a person sits outside the framework of formally diagnosable conditions you hear a lot more "you're too sensitive" and not much "you're not sensitive enough." This is partly attached to problematic ideas about masculinity. Boys are still being told to toughen up as a condition of being a man, but hypersensitivity is frowned upon in women too, just look at the horrifying history of “hysteria.” There is also a pervasive idea that people (especially women) can not be emotional and rational at the same time. I could talk about this all day (but I’ll try not to). For all of you with particularly sensitive hearts and minds and bodies and souls I hope you feel safe enough to feel and express the full range of your powerful emotions. The world needs more people who are not afraid to explore the furthest expanses of the heart. 260212 ... ovenbird One small addendum, because I’m feeling there’s a point I didn’t clearly articulate and my anxious brain is fixating on it and it’s that I am not at all opposed to medication as a tool for managing mental health issues. Medication can, and does, save lives and provides relief from a huge variety of debilitating challenges. No one should feel shame if they choose to support themselves with medication. It’s a tool that can be extremely effective. But there’s also a danger in narrowing the spectrum of “normal” and pressuring people to medicate away pieces of their personalities that are not, fundamentally, causing them distress, but are seen societally as problematic. Sensitivity often falls into this category because it’s often the case that a sensitive person suffers simply because the world refuses to provide any accommodation or understanding of their sensitivity rather than because sensitivity itself results in suffering. Sensitivity is distinct from anxiety and depression, though sensitive people are more likely to suffer from both of those things. And rather than building a world that sensitive people can comfortably live in, we offer medication as a stop-gap measure. This is profoundly problematic, but I would never judge anyone for using medication to quiet their nervous systems enough to survive. I’ve used medication myself for this reason, and still do occasionally. (I’ll stop rambling now.) 260213 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I feel like jumping around and saying, "Finally! Someone who understands." Or rather, "At least three someones who understand!" Wording is sensitive too; reading this made me think how "hypersensitive" rings much better than the judgy-sounding "oversensitive." "Hyper" seems like "more" rather than "too much." But that still doesn't solve the problem of people's tendency to measure people against whatever is the average. It's better to measure people against their own baselines. For example, when I was a baby or toddler, my mother worried that my body temperature was too cold. The doctor reassured her: people have different baseline temperatures, and it seems mine is closer to 36 than 37 C. That works for emotions too, I think. A couple of years ago, I got access to 4 free counseling sessions through Concordia's accessibility office, the focus being ADHD coaching. Chantal was amazing - wise beyond what I expected of a young Master's student (maybe I was comparing her to myself at that age!), but one of her recommendations puzzled me. It was when I told her about losing sleep over a misunderstanding with someone; I wanted to talk through things and maybe get advice on coping strategies. Besides that advice, she also suggested doing more counseling with the student health centre to help with emotional regulation. So I thought things like, "Well, that's weird. Aren't I doing better about anxiety than before? I don't think I need counseling for anxiety right now - it's more about working through this specific problem. But is my reaction so strange??" Looking back on this, I think the small disconnect was that she didn't know what my baseline emotional reactions were. How could she? It was only 4 sessions. Anxiety counseling HAD been a big help for me in the past, but it wouldn't cure me of being hypersensitive about some things - that's just something I have to work around and/or build on the good parts of that, like the figure in the video. 260213 ... e_o_i ...Oh, and please don't worry, ovenbird: I didn't read anything you wrote as being against medication. But I understand why you want to add context. I think. I do the same thing when telling people about Vyvanse: just because it didn't work well for me, I say, doesn't mean it can't help other people...and I give the example of my colleague N's student whose concentration was improved so much that she didn't need N's tutoring anymore (a slight downside for N., but better all around otherwise!) Now, there was a different thing that wasn't clear to me at first, but it's not something bad and I suspect it's just my narrow frame of reference: when I read how ADHD and autism can be associated with hyposensitivity, I read "hypersensitivity, yup," and then "oh no wait, it's the other one. Is that a typo?" A hypo typo? (thinks the hyper typer). But no, hyposensitivity makes sense too, the more I think about it: there's no reason why conditions that affect a range of thought processes (sometimes in a bad way, though not always) can't swing someone's baseline sensitivity in either direction. It's just that I'm more familiar with the "hypersensitivity in neurodivergence" side. If I could summarize what I've heard about this side, it goes sort of like... 1) ADHD folks are prone to emotional hypersensitivity 2) Autistic folks, both physical and emotional hypersensitivity ...but of course this is a massive generalization. E.g., yes, I know autistic people who were very sensitive to noise as kids, but also people (two of my cousins) who don't have a lot of sensitivities to noises, textures, and so on. I *do* happen to be like #1: I laugh and cry easily, I get momentarily excited or discouraged or worried verily easily...but I don't usually feel overwhelmed when the physical environment is overstimulating, e.g. when it's noisy. And I'm quite lucky not to get motion sickness easily. Three cheers for my inner ear! (and a whine for the tinnitus, but is this the "kvetch" page? It is not.) 260213 ... e_o_i is not the king james bible so "verily easily" was supposed to be "very easily" 260213 ... nr i have a lot to say on this, but for now i will just say a little. hello and power to us, sensitive humans. sometimes i see sensitivity as a double-edged sword. i can react sensitively to a comment yet at the same time be sensitive to why they may be making that comment. though i suppose the edges of that sword aren't equal. i used to be very wary of taking medication, worrying it would stifle my personality somehow. i'd be taking them for anxiety and depression, not sensitivity, but all those things do help each other exist. i finally caved after my mom passed away, and found the right medication didn't change who i was, but just made things a little easier. i'm not sure it did anything to the sensitivity, though, but i'm not sure i'd have wanted it to. 260213 ... ovenbird I somehow missed your contributions initially, e_o_i and nr! On the topic of hyposensitivity: it's such an interesting one. because it seems it can exist alongside hypersensitivity. My son's ADHD manifests this way. He has rejection sensitive dysphoria which makes him hypersensitive to perceived criticism but also has sensory hyposensitivity which means that he will seek extreme sensory experiences in order to access dopamine or adrenaline. He was the sort of kid who was throwing himself down the fire pole at the park at two years old. I'm so fascinated by the way this plays out differently for different people. It's most certainly complex, whether attached to neurodivergence or not, so thank you for sharing your own experience e_o_i! And nr, I very much relate to the double edged nature of sensitivity. It allows me to see and understand the emotional complexity of others, but is sometimes debilitating. For example, it's very difficult for me to enjoy a party or loud, crowded environments, because I quickly become overwhelmed and my body and brain shut down. A club for hypersensitive people would be the greatest thing. We could meet at a library. And spend a good chunk of the time silently reading together. Then go for a walk in the woods and have fascinating conversations. 260217 what's it to you? who go blather from