I am putting together a short speech for the office meeting and my chosen subject is how I discovered I am an HSP. I still remember it vividly. I was blind-sided by the moment.
When I turned 13, my family moved from the town I’d spent most of my childhood in to a completely new town. I left behind my two best friends, my comfort zone, and also all those terrible memories of being picked on as a kid because I was shy and different. I decided – partly in self defense, because I was on my own to make new friends – that I needed to change who I was. I became an extrovert and a leader. I never quite broke through into any of the social cliques during my four years of high school, but I managed well enough to form lasting friendships and to forge a new way of approaching any social challenge life handed me: head on. Later, when I moved, by my choice, to Oregon, those skills were put to the test again: I didn’t have family here to support me and I had to make my own circle or sphere of influence. Again, when we moved from Eastern Oregon to the Portland area, I had to go through all those survival steps and forge new friendships.
32 years later, I was enjoying a new job as a receptionist in a relatively busy little office. I’d pushed that sensitive little girl from my childhood back into a closet, closed and locked the door. As far as I was concerned, she no longer existed.
Then the fire alarm went off. The first time, we treated it like a fire drill and evacuated the building. The decibels were just unbearable: why do they make those things so loud that they threaten to burst your ear drums? Isn’t there a law against having sounds that loud go off so close to your head? And what about coworkers who somehow think they are above the fire alarm and refuse to leave the building? I got kind of nasty with one guy: if he didn’t leave, we couldn’t leave and I sure as H-E-doublechopsticks wasn’t staying, so he’d better get his horse’s behind OUT. The second time it went off, we evacuated. But then it just began to go off randomly. There was a short in the system. And we no longer left the building, but had to endure that throbbing high pitched decibel ringing ringing ringing ringing (you get the picture).
You couldn’t guess when it would go off and you couldn’t guess for how long it would ring and you couldn’t control how loud it was. It vibrated. It startled. It interrupted. And after an hour of listening to it, I was a puddle of jello and jangled nerves. I was crying. I couldn’t speak coherently. My boss sent me home.
I was commuting with a friend in those days and she wasn’t rattled, so she was not going to take me the ten miles back home. She was staying at work. In fact, no one else in the office was rattled. Only me. So I called my husband and asked him to pick me up when he got off work (three hours earlier than I would normally have gone home). That meant I needed to spend a couple hours somewhere while I waited – somewhere quiet, preferably. I chose a book store.
I really didn’t know what to do with myself. I was edgy and confused, jumpy: if someone dropped a book, I felt like I left my skin behind. I just wanted to curl up in a dark room and cry for a long long time (which is what I eventually did). I wandered the aisles of the bookstore aimlessly, not really wanting to sit down and read: I just wanted something familiar and comfortable. But as I stared at the shelves, this self help book caught my eye. i don’t do self-help books very often. Usually, they don’t tell me something I do not know about myself. I liked the title of this one: “The Highly Sensitive Person” by Elaine Aron.
Well, I sure felt Highly Sensitive right then. And by the time I took the little self-test, I KNEW I was Highly Sensitive. I knew that I scored 23 on a Bad Day and 20 on a Good Day – that’s 23 True answers to 23 questions. OUCH. That little girl was kicking my shins, trying to get out of that dark closet!
I read the book. And read it again. And again. Any time I am feeling particularly overwhelmed by what is going on in my life, I read it. I reframe my life. I suddenly saw that I had never really “made” myself an extrovert. I lived within the walls of my self-defense castle and the moats were deep and wide. So wide that I thought I was protected from myself.
All it took was an unruly (and ungodly) fire alarm to breach the moat and I was a basket case. I always was a basket case, but now I understood WHY and what to do about it. I understood that the “too-sensitive” child I had been labeled as was NORMAL. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was who I was, and now I could frame my world with that knowledge that who I was included a trait that 15-20% of the world also possesses. I really wasn’t weird or alone! And I really was different: it wasn’t all in my head.
My dad used to tell the story of how he met my mom. They knew each other, but they didn’t really know each other until he decided to pull a practical joke on her: he put one of those exploding devices in her cigarette when she wasn’t looking. When the cigarette “popped!” what was supposed to be a joke they would laugh about for years unraveled before his eyes. My mom dissolved into a puddle of jello and jangled nerves and he had to drive her home from work so she could hide in a dark room and cry.
I understand my mother. I understand the bout she had with Valium: the nervous breakdown she had when I was 11-12 years old. We tiptoed through that and she recovered, we recovered, and it was never really mentioned again. She was an HSP with no tools to understand her world.
There will be about 30 people in the meeting tomorrow. I hope that by telling my story (I ended up on Zoloft for five years and I still have to decompress after every work day), I will help someone discover something about themselves that helps them reframe their world and gives them a new hope. I know I have a new outlook on life – and a new coping strategy for when things overwhelm me.
I get the heck out of Dodge and find a nice quiet place.
