So I am an HSP. A Highly Sensitive Person. I have heard this term over the past few months and I thought that it was just another fad, another way to explain the obvious, but I see now that it is actually a recognized (since the 1990s) personality trait, or rather a set of personality traits that signifies behavior patterns in a person.
This should probably not be surprising to me or anyone else who knows me, and when my husband just came upstairs and I read some of the questions to him from the HSP self test, it felt a little crazy ridiculous that there would be any question at all that I’m an HSP. But understand that from time to time when I stumble upon these new-to-me psychological terms and ideas they feel revolutionary amazing. Curious. And as I have an endless fascination with myself I tend to dive into these new ideas face-first and all the way down to the bottom of the creek. I discovered my bipolar disorder this way.
I’m so sensitive to sounds that any loud motorcycle has always been offensive to me and actually frightened me greatly when I was a little girl. Sirens are piercingly loud and I cover my ears. My startle response has gotten so bad that I jump out of my skin and sometimes even scream a little when my son who has a very soft way of walking startles me. I remove the tags from all of my shirts and dresses and sweaters. I simply cannot endure the feeling of a tag against my skin. (Most of these things are getting worse as I age and deal with chronic migraine)
When I was little and I would probably feel the same way now, going to the gym and doing PE was awful. I was afraid of balls of being hit this was by balls of throwing balls of catching balls I hated balls in any sport that had to do with balls and that was most of them. While I was a very active child climbing trees running across the fields doing lots of vigorous exercise like biking and hiking, I did not have an affinity for any sort of group sport. Over the past few weeks I’ve realized that I was just plain scared as a kid. I was frightened of so many things, and whether I had good reason to be afraid of things because of what was going on in my environment and the trauma that I experienced, or whether it was just because of the way I’m wired and I would have been a scared kid no matter what my environment, I cannot know.
I have often wondered that if I hadn’t been so sensitive I might not even consider lots of the things that happened in my childhood as trauma, but for me they were traumatic. And if I hadn’t experienced so much trauma as a child I might not even be so sensitive but there’s really no way of knowing. I don’t even know if I would actually have ever written poetry if my house hadn’t burned down when I was twelve. The trauma from that threw me over a high wall and landed me in an impossibly-weird highly-charged magical place where I was writing constantly hearing voices speaking lines of poetry so intense so overwhelming so compulsive I could not have possibly not written I was just SO sensitive.
Over the past three years or so I’ve been wondering if I was ever really an extrovert and anyone who knows me will laugh at that because I’m so outgoing, so loud, so friendly, so able to strike up a conversation with just anybody while waiting in line at the grocery store or amusement park. But the reason I asked this question about myself not being an extrovert and actually I would say that I’m definitely not an extrovert at this point if those terms extrovert and introvert actually mean anything, is that bipolar, my particular flavor of bipolar mixed in with my particular type of creativity drove me to perform in social situations and my performances were often accompanied by alcohol by really heavy drinking of alcohol as a social lubricant to make my socializing, i.e. performing, bearable. I’ve always thought this was because I felt so bad about myself and so undeserving that I had to get drunk to move through those spaces when I was surrounded by people like students on Tuesday nights when I used to teach creative nonfiction and was so wholly myself so wholly bipolar so wholly vulnerable that I would drive home and drink a half a bottle of wine really quickly to assuage my agony over how I felt how I had been so much, too much, over-the-top, crazy, loud, weird and oh-may-god-I’m-going-to-get-into-trouble!!
I’m wondering if being performative, feeling the need to entertain people and be the center of attention, really has anything at all to do with being an extrovert and (I’ll be finding this out very soon because I got the book about highly sensitive people), whether being an extrovert has anything at all to do with being highly sensitive. I suspect that you can be really social and still be highly sensitive and rush to get away from everybody during a party which I’ve always felt the need to do. I will find out.
I’m working with a new counselor and I will be going over this highly sensitive stuff with her but I suspect that what we talked about yesterday is far more important and that was dissociative behavior. I’ve known for a long time that I dissociate on a regular basis but until yesterday I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. Now to be clear everybody disassociates to some degree on a regular basis, i.e. like when you’re driving home the same way you always do and then suddenly you get home and you’re like how did I get here I don’t remember driving at all. That’s what it’s like to disassociate and for me I spend a lot of time… Falling through space. That’s a little bit what it’s like.
I will go downstairs to get a cup and then find myself two or three hours later doing all sorts of things I didn’t intend to do and think to myself what have I been doing? Why is it already noon? What have I been doing? Then later, when I do sit down to do the things I originally wanted to do, I will say to myself I haven’t done a thing all day. What have I been doing? Until yesterday I had thought that going from chore to chore to nit-picking the kitchen drawers in a kind of daze was a sort of ADHD behavior but now I’m not so sure.
This sort of disassociation, wondering how you got home because you’ve been driving in a daze, and what I understood it to be/mean, but my counselor mentioned something else that rang true, and that is the questioning of reality. This is something I do all the time and I do mean all the time. I can see how this would connect to being an HSP and how just being highly sensitive overall is going to cause you to pay so much more attention to your environment than say someone who’s not as sensitive so that you’re bound to question things about the reality around you and inside you. Let me explain… I see faces in everyday objects. I’ve written about this before on my blog so I won’t go into it too much. This is not psychosis, rather it’s my way of interpreting my reality.
It can be a lot to walk into a room and see faces in the covers on the bed, the way they’re twisted together because the bed is not made-up, and the faces can seem almost intrusive at times…they will mimic the voices that I’ve been hearing in my head, again not psychosis just some of the internal dialogue going on in my brain. At the very least this will cause me to question my reality on a very fundamental basis… I know those faces I see are not real and that those faces have no personalities and that they are not actually talking to me but at the same time what the hell’s going on? Why am I creating this scene that I’m playing out in the bedroom ? What has been going on during the day that has led me to this moment?
I’ve always questioned my the reality of my pain whether or not it’s real whether I’ve made-up it up whether I want it to be real whether I’m trying to get attention whether I’m really hurting whether I’m really hurting as bad as I say I am whether or not I’m trying to milk the moment for all it’s worth and get attention just like I did from my daddy when I was having a fever once long ago.
I constantly question my perceptions when I’m around other people, how they affect me, how the placement of the furniture in their houses affects me, look at that weird vase of flowers that strange centerpiece why am I at this party am I really at this party is any of this real am I dreaming what’s going on when will this stop when will I wake up think I will have a drink now I think I will eat two pieces of chocolate cake without looking like I’m eating two pieces of chocolate cake why am I eating two pieces of chocolate cake I don’t even want this cake I don’t even like cake do I like cake what’s going on?
And then there’s the “reset” feeling, which happens a lot a lot. Everyone feels this after a holiday or vacation or a major life event, but it seems to me that I am, especially lately, feeling this often. It’s as though another person, another me, replaces me–like I’ve been slightly out of phase and then I come back, I step from behind the scrim on stage and watch myself snapping back into place over my face. Sometimes it feels so weird it’s like getting an entirely new body/person so that I can pick up where I left off.
I don’t want to write anymore about this right now because it’s gonna eat up my entire morning but suffice it to say that I will be talking to my counselor about this a lot in the coming weeks, because I do think it’s really important. Because there are reasons that I go downstairs for a cup and then instead of getting that cap spend two hours reorganizing the spare room. I know that the solution to the problem on a super level is to get the cup and go right back upstairs like I had planned, and then think about whether or not I want to do anything else or get back to the thing I was doing. I need to find a way to dominate that moment in time because that’s where i really am. I think what’s happening is I’m falling back into either a former moment or a former feeling leftover from trauma and so I am inhabiting a traumatic space without realizing it and spacing out so that I can get through that moment, and/or I’m just overwhelmed and lose track of what I’m doing because I feel like I’m in a whirling morass of moments that are just too much for me to deal with and the emotions that I’m actually having in that moment that I’m working really hard not to have at all. Having the time taking the time training myself to actually stay in a moment and feel the emotions that I’m feeling is going to be the key here. I’m not exactly afraid of doing this work with my counselor because I don’t think I’m going to “discover” any new traumas that I “don’t remember,” but I do think that I’m sort of afraid of how difficult this will be.
This feeling of lost time, of falling through space, of coming “to” later on going what the hell just happened is why I am able to binge eat and feel pretty much no contact at all between my body and the fact that I just ingested a lot a lot a lot of food and don’t even feel slightly full from it. I have gotten so used to cordoning off my body from my brain and stuffing down emotions just as Oprah has talked about for years… This is making me feel uncomfortable now, I’m getting the familiar tightness in my chest for this is the bedrock this is the stuff that is underneath all the other stuff, this is why the second time I was hospitalized for depression I asked for a counselor who specialized in eating disorders, this is why my bipolar friend and I have said so many times that no matter how much we improve the food is still there. The issues with food remain, the issues with body, these things underpin all the other things. I’ve known this for years, I’ve had counselors work through my entire childhood babyhood young adulthood adulthood pregnancies being in love being angry being vulnerable being afraid the death of my mother the fear of death the imposter feelings the I’mfatuglyawfulselfishuselessangrylazytiredsorrysorrysososorry blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah for over twenty-five years but no matter how many insights how many breakthroughs how many moments of absolute clarity I’ve achieved during my years of counseling, the food remains the body remains the belly remains. And the empty hungry gnawing never satisfied never ever ever full enough monster little girl champion eater remains. And she is angry, defiant, rebellious, up yours MFR. No matter what I do the little girl remains.
And that, my friends, is the crux of the matter.
Which double sucks because at the end of the day it’s all about mindfulness and I have always always been very defiant about never ever ever walking into the stream into the center finding the stone and sitting down and observing the universe. I have said many times that I will never ever do it and that I have no interest in enlightenment.
But it seems that enlightenment has a lot of interest in me.
Genene Roth wrote about the stillness between breaths, the space where you can find the moment before you binge or purge. She writes that finding that moment and that learning to be in that space is the key to breaking free from compulsive overeating. Even now her description terrifies me on a very ground floor level because I fall into those spaces all the time, those spaces between breaths, but I fall into those spaces unknowingly and unintentionally and while I’m there I don’t breathe at all, I don’t feel anything at all, and for so long I thought that’s what mindfulness actually was a complete disconnecting from the world. But that is not what it is. Disconnecting and Disengaging are not the same thing.
Good Lord. This has been very long it’s a lot. And I’m more than a little bit anxious now that I’ve written this although I’m very glad that I’ve have written it and actually I’m not really that anxious and I’m gonna look at magic cards now and it’ll be great and I’ll be very relaxed and I have to stay off my feet today anyway due to “issues” which is one of the only ways to get me to really rest so there it is.
When I do psychological work I do psychological work. And how*.
~r.
*this new counselor is very young but savvy enough to warn me, rightly, to be aware of whether this type of self…examination is punitive.
