HSPness

A shifting sense of self, life  always seemed to  contradict  my stated intentions  I sought  to  understand   what was wrong  was I cursed at birth or something? .  Ranging between  bouts of  deep  depression and  an intense desire to escape from feelings of impotence  that was the default in my moments of silence .  

Elaine Aron’s  work only came known to me in about 2013. I thought then it  was  interesting  it applied to me but “not that much” in my quest  I  discovered with works of Dorothy Rowe and  Susan Cain  interesting theories that calmed me  while reading ,  according to them I was in the introverted  category.  However  once  I put the books down the darkness would return

"Because the  conditions We traveled by road   for 5 hrs, a journey that should have taken an hour and a half , we got back home eat and had slept but it has taken 48 hours to recover enough to function . Why?

The day after we returned   we had this intense desire to listen  to  music “just some music the I will put it  off and focus ”, instead we spend all the  day  soothed  by  rhythms  but  that  makes us feel  even worse  later,  we have done  no  work ,  over  indulgence,  we can hear  the voice in our head of the disapproving  parent  ‘”you are  fun loving”

This  would be a typical example scenario  that I would go through , my  first instinct, to blame myself for my inability to recover  enough the next day to  achieve my sated  goals . My perfectionist  sense of righteousness  would  confirm what  the self talk  has been saying over the years about me being an eternal failure .  Knowing that it was the compound effect of stress on easily over stimulated nervous system  won’t  come naturally despite all my reading.

For  a man to accept the HSP tag especially with loaded meaning that the word “sensitivity” brings is not easy. You say that word and what he hears is weak and effeminate it does not help   that society  has the same implicit bias against it.. 

I began to accept the trait as I found more about  the biological roots  of it “If it this was true” It meant that this was more fundamental to my nature than I thought.  It also meant  I  could begin to forgive  myself  for what I saw as my  inability to function as well  in certain environments that others took for granted from a far back as my school days, at this time more than 30 years in the past.