“Too Sensitive”

Spoiler alert: I don’t think sensitivity is a bad thing. It’s actually served me very well in nannying, working with animals, and leading students on outdoor and international trips. When I’ve used it well, sensitivity has helped me create incredibly meaningful and significant connections in relationships. I’m still working on managing it, but I have no desire to tamper it down.

Emotions have never been easy for me. Even as a child, I didn’t know what to do with them. I’ve always struggled with black and white thinking, so like so many other things in my life, whatever I was feeling had to be all or nothing. I was perfectly composed, not letting anything big or small break through my carefully constructed wall. OR I had completely lost control and my emotions (usually) came out sideways. There was no in between. When I feel emotions, I feel them BIG. Part of this experience has to do with the fact that I am and have always been a highly empathetic person. I pick up on subtle emotional cues from others and often have trouble distinguishing my own experience from what I am sensing in others. It’s really easy for me to drown in other people’s emotions, so for a long time my only protection against that was completely shutting down to numb them.

Slowly and with a lot of help, I have started to be able to challenge this mindset and not demonize my emotions or stuff them down. I am now starting to be able to accept that I do not need to have it all together all of the time and that doing so would not be normal or healthy. I’m still willing to give other people a lot more grace and wiggle room in imperfection. I think that’s actually pretty common- too demand more from yourself that others. They say you’re your own worst critic and it’s very true. It’s a work in progress for sure, but I’m trying.

However, most of this growth took place in a kind of bubble, where I was surrounded by people who agreed with, endorsed, and supported my process of learning to understand that allowing yourself to have off days and to feel negative emotions is not only ok, but necessary. It was a lot simpler to accept these ideas somewhat hidden away from the real world because, as I’m learning, there are plenty of people who will endorse the opposite ideas, the ones I spent the past 20 years believing. It’s confusing to try and hold onto what I know to be appropriate to expect of myself and what I can give myself grace with while also encountering somewhat blatant messages about needing to manage emotions better and be grateful about where I am and what I am getting to do. And don’t get me wrong, I am EXTREMELY grateful for this opportunity, I love what I’m doing, and I adore the chimps, but that doesn’t mean I need to be over the moon excited (or even just happy) about it 24/7. I’m learning that that isn’t realistic or healthy.

And also that I don’t have any responsibility to shape my personality to be what is most convenient and pleasant for other people. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s ok to just say “screw it” and disregard how my words and actions can affect people. It’s not a get out of jail free card. Hurting people, intentionally or not, is one of my biggest fears and I like to think that will stay constant because of what I value. But unmasking is freedom in a sense because it means that it’s ok to be authentic, to not play roles for people because the “real” me (whatever that means) isn’t good enough.

I think that right now is weirdly somehow simultaneously the best and worst possible time to be examining who I am, what I want to be, and why. I can’t help feeling pressure to put my existential crises off a little bit, mostly to be able to get stuff done for the sanctuary and for school, but also a little bit because procrastination in this case would allow me to function more in survival mode to just get through this. But I’m tired of survival mode. It has its time and place, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. So I’m working on choosing to focus instead on how now, of all times, is when we should all be a little kinder and more understanding to both ourselves and others. There is a literal global pandemic going on right now, so we all deserve space to cope in healthy ways and to have times where we let ourselves feel the anxiety, frustration, helplessness, and whatever else comes up around that. Those feelings are real and valid and pretending they aren’t there isn’t doing anyone any favors. As someone very dear to me once told me, when we block out the bad, we also block out the good.