“Don’t look at it Jess, you’ll be sad for days”.
Words I often hear from my husband.
Sometimes I do open the article, sometimes it’s about what’s going on in the world, animal cruelty, child abuse...
and I’ll think about it for days, weeks, in 10 years from now.
I still think about stories I’ve been told, other people’s losses, how it happened, news I saw on TV when I was 7.
I still carry that sadness, not always, but the feelings hit me like little flecks and leave tiny marks.
I always wondered how people could watch horrific movies without pausing it to talk it through.
Or hear about a horrible news event and quickly shrug it off.
Did people not lie awake at night over things like I did?
My friend told me about a time in high school and she saw someone at a party kick a hedgehog off a hill, she’s like me, and she yelled at him for doing it and wanted to go home.
Everyone else laughed.
I wasn’t even there and I think about that.
And that’s a hedgehog in the scheme of the world.
It feels like your feelings have no armour when you’re highly sensitive, it’s such a power that needs protecting.
Because our only weakness is for others, and so is our strength.
And to be told constantly that you’re too sensitive only threatens to harden a heart that was never meant to be.
Everyone is affected by sadness, even if it’s not their own.
But when you’re highly sensitive you wear it like a jersey, you don’t take it off at night either, it feels a bit scratchy and sometimes it keeps you up.
But it’s familiar, it’s warm, it’s heavy, yet comforting too.
I want him to know that feeling deeply is beautiful and brave, that it can feel like oceans of tears but also hundreds of rays of sunshine wanting to explode out of you.
I want him to know I get it.
He will see things others don’t.
He will feel things others don’t.
He will try to make sense of things he can’t in a messy world.
It’s an unravelling,
of the greatest gift.
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