The highly sensitive writer

Our words gives space to an exhausting world.

This is an example of cover art I created by cutting shapes from construction paper for a short story I wrote in fourth grade, entitled, Enchanted Castle. Circa 1990

The gift of sensitivity in childhood: imagination, wonder, and compassion

I am five or six years old. I’m sitting on my bedroom floor, and I gingerly empty the contents of a ceramic baby booty I keep on the top shelf of my closet. Inside are my most prized treasures: a cutesy pin of a cat in ballet shoes and a tutu; a rosary from my parents; a holy card with an image of a guardian angel; a few coins. As the contents fall to the floor, I pick up the holy card first, winding my finger across the angel’s wings, imagining what it must be like to be free, to fly.

This begins an internal dialogue, a prayer: God, someday I want to do big things with my life.

My heart undulates with this desire to share whatever it is I have to give, whatever it is I am meant to give to others. I don’t know what these gifts are yet, and I don’t really know what I’m saying. But I mean every word.

It is silent in my room. Usually, I close the door so that I don’t have to hear the distant din of my mom pattering down the stairs or clanking pots and pans in the kitchen directly below my bedroom floor. I don’t want to hear Swizzle (our dog) barking when the doorbell rings, or my brother David clashing his G.I. Joes together as they battle against the “bad guys.”

What I want is solitude. And I have it in my bedroom, which I’ve made into my monastery: posters of artwork that inspire me; books filed in tidy rows on the shelf above my desk; art supplies (colorful construction paper, markers and colored pencils, drawing paper, notebooks) carefully stacked above my dresser. Everything I have and need for creating surrounds me.

I don’t need a lot, but there’s something I know, even at age five or six: that my mind is fertile soil, and my heart is bursting with a seed I hope to share once it germinates. Life is this spectrum of vibrant color for me, always. I feel my feelings with intensity and frequency, whether anger, sadness, and loneliness; or elation, exuberance, and delight.

I think about what I learn at school, about oceans and endangered animals and the Bosnian War and poverty and natural disasters. I think about religion and what makes people believe different things, or nothing at all. I think about the elements and nature, and I take it all home with me and ponder everything.

What I don’t know at this age is that I am highly sensitive, and that high sensitivity is both a psychological trait and a gift. What I’m told instead is to “cheer up” or “stop crying” or “you’re too sensitive.” I believe this. I believe that I am too much of the bad things: sensitive, shy, introverted, emotional; and not enough of the good things: bubbly, friendly, happy-go-lucky, conversational.

I ask too many questions, and they’re often the ones that make adults squirm, like, why are the rainforests being cut down and the animals who live there dying off? Or, how come people fight in wars about who gets to live on certain land? Or, how can we help the man on the corner holding the cardboard sign?

I notice things. Everything. And my heart can’t contain all the strife and sadness I see around me. I hate knowing that animals die. I hate seeing video footage of oil spills and dead animals washed ashore. I feel helpless knowing there are families who can’t pay their bills, don’t have enough to eat, and children without toys.

Though I don’t yet understand my privilege, I do understand that my heart feels at a level most people around me do not. I absorb and sense and intuit what I cannot explain using numbers and evidence. I just know some things.

What I do (because I must release all of these emotions and ideas) is create. I paint. I sketch. I draw cartoon characters and create comics. I dabble in watercolors, take a few classes. I try my hand at monochromatics. I journal. I tell my diary —and God —my deepest, darkest secrets and spill all of my pain into the colors of paint and oil pastels and words. The catharsis becomes my avenue to clarity, but even more, I recognize the power of creating.

I’m dating myself badly here, but this was the program for the Young Author’s Conference I attended in fourth grade. My friend, Kristine, and I co-authored a story called A House on Haunted Hill, which we read aloud to students from other schools. This was the event that birthed my dream to become an artist of some type, someday.

Highly sensitive people tend to be very creative.

Highly sensitive people exist in about 20% of any given population, according to the decades-long research of Dr. Elaine Aron. This includes different ages, genders, races, ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses. Only 20%. That means, if you are highly sensitive, you can wager that you are in the minority when you are in a crowd, even a small one.

I felt strange when I was a kid, and I knew I wasn’t like most people. I deduced this every time I’d comment on a subject, whether conversational or academic, and the room would fall silent. Or someone would furrow their eyebrows and say, “Hmm, I’ve never thought of that before.” Sometimes people said nothing and promptly changed the subject.

Here’s how the trait of high sensitivity might affect you, according to Dr. Aron’s research. You are:

Better at spotting errors and avoiding making errors;
Highly conscientious;
Able to concentrate deeply (but without distractions);
Especially good at tasks requiring vigilance, accuracy, speed, and the detection of minor differences;
Able to process material to deeper levels of what psychologists call “semantic memory” (long-term memory for making meaning and understanding the world¹);
Often think about your thinking (or what is known as meta-cognition in psychology);
Able to learn something new without being aware that you’ve learned;
Deeply affected by other people’s moods or emotions.²

Our nervous systems are also wired to a threshold of sensitivity, which can mean the following:

We have specialized fine motor skills;
We are good at holding still;
We are usually “morning people” (with many exceptions, says Dr. Aron);
We are more affected by stimulants such as caffeine;
We are more “right-brained” (less linear and more creative in a synthesizing way);
We are more sensitive to things in the air (like pollutants, or we may have allergies and asthma and develop reactions to perfumes and dyes in products).³

The bottom line is that we feel a constellation of emotions, often intensely and deeply. We have a rich inner life: a vivid imagination, likely pictorial, and vast wildernesses we want to cultivate. What could be better suited for a person skilled at writing, or any creative work?

Dr. Aron explains in her book that “we are the writers, historians, philosophers, judges, artists, researchers, theologians, therapists, teachers, parents…”⁴ Because of our fine-tuned perception and ability to see nuance where most do not, we fill the advisory roles in society. We provide thoughtful, tender insights, and we hold space for others to do the same.

A highly sensitive writer takes what stirs within her heart and gives birth to it on the page. She extends her heart-in-hand as an offering to the world, because she believes that what she conjures in the universes inside her is worth permanence and connection. And she does not eschew pain —hers or others’—but instead incorporates everything she feels and observes and internalizes into the creative work that, she hopes, will bring forth some shred of light, encouragement, and beauty to a dismal world.

I didn’t comprehend when I was a little girl that my art could be something substantial, the meat-and-potatoes, the sustenance that might one day keep me alive. Or even enliven others. I created for the sake of creating, because it was the one avenue I could get what was inside of me on the outside. And I knew that the abstract ideas and lofty images needed to take shape somehow.

A sensitive heart is fragile, though. The highly sensitive in society are the ones who warn everyone else about impending threats, deep-seated injustices, and inevitable destruction. We have a pulse on the zeitgeist, the thrummings of division and chaos and recklessness. And we love so fiercely that we do what we can—perhaps through art—to bring about some semblance of good, to be harbingers of peace, to return to warmth, acceptance, patience, and kindness.

1. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/semantic-memory for full explanation on semantic memory.

2. Aron, Elaine. The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You (Harmony Books, NY: 1996), pp. 10-11.

3. Ibid, p. 11.

4. Ibid, p. 18.