Living with this much feeling

My sensitivity is a shadow and a gift

stunning shot of her son by Sally Mann, American photographer

Others picked words for me. I’m now sure they weren’t fully aware of this. Nevertheless, the effect was inevitable: they picked at my tender heart. The wide open flank of a child born porous. I translated the shockwaves of my emotions into the need to lock myself up in a well, a safe place to study how others moved through the world with seeming ease. Their words felt grown up and fluent while mine seemed reluctant and just forming.

They echoed a smaller and flawed version of me, in my ears at least. “She is shy, silent, in deep waters,” they’d say, unaware of how hostile that sounded to me. Inside my childhood self, it became imperative to stay calm and collected on the outside, to only let the crisis’ atmosphere rage within. Did they ever sense danger the way I could, this critical need to retreat? Surely, this didn’t warrant a scene. All I had to do was survive one more terribly long moment and keep it together. Like this:

We sit down for lunch. My sister says something clever to my mother, some poignant opinion, presented with loud conviction. I add something, just to join in, but they don’t respond. Was there an exchange of glances, or did I just imagine that? Their quick banter continues toward a crescendo, followed by their laughter, rising like a tide, leaving me outside of its current. I’m unmoored; still at the table, but already floating elsewhere, far from shore.

This thing – this dreaded sensitivity – it arrived in waves. Gently, ongoing, or sudden and crushing, laying a heavy blanket of shame onto my heart. It was blinding me, disorienting me, obstructing clear thinking, making me wonder: How can I survive this much feeling?

I schlepped it through the years, like a heavy stone in my pocket weighing me down. Feeling fully was a danger to shield from and made me turn to strategies of hesitation. Surrendering to aliveness and joy could feel misplaced in the face of such heaviness, like light in a sealed room. Outwardly, I tried to smile instead of breaking down, reserving such defeat only for the times when I could no longer hold the barricades, when the center had to give way.

This was the call to insulate more and create yet better adaptations. This was my own race to tame this hard-to-control world and keep my sensitive core safe. And wow, it worked. I became the observer, the thinker, the likable, the sweet one. The one to be chosen.

Only that there was this trouble: the more I achieved to insulate from emotional struggle, the more I shrank. In taming the world I also tamed myself, dulling the edge of my very nature and aliveness. It was a Faustian deal for survival. Small, accumulating self-betrayals. A translation of myself into something legible, less wild and more palatable. Was the bargain worth it?

It took me time to grow to understand this. At first, there was a vague ache, a grief for something I that was hard to locate. Then I started to see the horrendous cost: how in emotionally retreating and abandoning parts of myself, I had also betrayed and locked away parts of my own truth. The dark inner shadow had turned me against my own innocent and noble self. The irony. In trying to escape the original ache, I was deepening the very void I was trying to outrun. The pain as well as my insulation from it. That was the real exile, the swamp of living out of integrity.

The ache swelling and my heart revolting, I got tired of my own strategies. And underneath it all, there was something beckoning. I think I know now that this something was my future self whispering, subtly pulling me toward my wholeness and own adventures.

This journey carried me far from my homeland, onto a new continent, where I practiced the bravery of my wild becoming. Slowly, I grew into more self-trust to continue to follow the North Star of my creative, authentic self. My eyes and heart opened to the beauty and love that was all around me and within reach. I was rescuing myself by way of seeing things differently, and allowing myself to see the beauty and preciousness of the life I was building. It felt like claiming something that had been waiting for me, and my heart’s blueprint, all along.

I came to understand that my sensitivity was a kind of special intelligence. It kept me safe, let me listen carefully to others, and, maybe best of all, gave me embodied access to my own subtle intuition and the many synchronous nods the world offered to me.

In this way, the shadow I had tried to lock away had guarded me and been guarding something for me. The lock and its key were my magic of seeing feelingly. My deep river has been carving its own path, waiting for me to let its current carry me toward what I value most. Attention, presence, language, love.

This connection to my core remains a sustaining mystery. Putting one true word after another for this piece felt vulnerable and slow. It took me several weeks. Or, who knows, maybe a whole lifetime, after all. A release and a return to something familiar, only that I can now live my life more in relation with and service to the world.

My sensitivity is morphing into something like a lifelong friend. And to my mother and sister: I love you so wildly, I may never find the words to properly express.