Comfort Zero
The Highly Sensitive Person (or HSP), a term developed by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. (author of The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You), is perhaps a designation that is meant to make those of us with heightened sensitivities feel better about the fact that we’re also sometimes Supremely Annoying People. We can be hard to get along with, and our sensitivities make us seem a variety of uncomplimentary things. For instance, neurotic.
Society is bound to say a number of comforting words to the highly sensitive, such as “Suck it up,” “Quit complaining,” “It doesn’t bother me,” “You’re so particular,” “Just get over it,” and my personal favorite, “I don’t see what the problem is; I don’t smell/sense/hear/see anything wrong.”
All of these statements are true. They are also not true. It certainly feels like we can’t help feeling the way we do. It isn’t neuroses (which is constant anxiety for no apparent reason). And being this thin-skinned is torture. According to Aron, HSPs have trouble screening out stimuli. We tend to take in all the subtleties that others miss. What seems ordinary to most people—such as loud music, crowds, sirens, bright lights, strange odors, and clutter—can be highly stimulating (thus stressful) to HSPs. Most people will feel tired at the end of a long day of work, yet they can still muster up the energy to go out for an evening on the town; however, many HSPs are likely to require solitude and time to recover after the same level of activity. HSPs also tend to notice a far greater amount of specific (often subtle) detail in their environment, including the moods of others, the quality of the air, strange odors, the interpersonal relationships of those around them—all things that tend to join together to form the overall energy of an environment.
Ivan Pavlov, in his study with animals, found that organisms have different levels of tolerance. (I know, shocking.) The term for this, transmarginal inhibition, relates to an organism’s response to overwhelming stimuli. Pavlov noted that this level of tolerance varied widely depending on differences in temperament. He suggested that those who reached a “shutdown point” more quickly had a fundamentally different type of nervous system.
This all sounds very important, but really it just boils down to this: Having a low threshold for stimulus is frustrating, at best. At worst, it feels like you are an alien struggling to breathe in an atmosphere that was not made for your particular set of lungs.
But wait! I’ve been on the receiving end as well. I know first-hand how frustrating it can be to cater to someone else’s sensitivities. For example, my mother can’t stand the smell of rice cooking in my rice cooker. It will throw her into a frenzy of movement. First, she will screech, “WHAT is that smell?” Next, she will begin throwing open windows, then rushing to turn on the whole house fan. Suddenly, it sounds like a jet is landing in the kitchen. The temperature drops ten degrees. Afterwards, she will look at me reproachfully, as if I have just made an attempt on her life. Death by Long Grain Basmati.
But in return, the smell of bleu cheese makes me want to hurl. (I hold my breath in the cheese aisle of the Giant Eagle.) So does the smell of onion skin left in the garbage overnight. Also, the smell of deodorant sprays, perfumes, candles, incense, solvents, oil-based paints, powders, marijuana, cigarette smoke, car exhaust, hot tar, cleaners of almost all kinds, chemicals in general . . . actually, what doesn’t bother me? That might be a shorter list.
But the catalogue of my sensitivities doesn’t stop there. I’m sensitive to wheat, dairy, soy, artificial sweeteners, spices, too much stress, too much movement (not enough movement), too much talking (not enough talking), prolonged loud noises, crowds, confined spaces, harsh fabrics, dust, pollen, freshly cut grass, pet hair, too much cold, too much heat, as little as even two seconds of hearing Tuvan throat singers . . . It’s a wonder I’m able to take one step forward without collapsing into a ball of goo. (To which I would probably be allergic.)
Also, I happen to react easily to other people’s moods and emotions. I might have been in a good mood five minutes ago, right before you walked in with your bad day wafting off your skin like Eau de Stilton. (For your information, that’s an English perfume that blends the essence of blue-veined Stilton cheese with angelica seed and valerian. Nice.)
Somehow, I manage to function in society, but not without a lot of careful orchestration—and also, not all that often.
I work from home, and when I DO venture out, it’s normally to run errands or to shop at the grocery store, maybe the library, the occasional familiar bar to listen to music, or familiar theater to watch a movie (where I might try to seat myself as far away from people as possible) . . . but places where I’m actually expected to interact with people I don’t know (meaning, people who don’t know about me in all my “quirkgloriousness”)? Are you kidding me? You mean, out there?
Yes. Out there. It has to be done. As much as people like Elaine Aron want me to feel all warm and snuggly about being a Highly Sensitive Person, I admit that I don’t feel all that special. (Unless by “special” you mean a person who is emotionally or physically handicapped.)
It is true that there are certain positives. Being so cognizant of subtleties and details makes me good at my job as an editor and designer; it also helps me to draw deep connections between things, which is a tool I have used frequently in my writing, along with being able to deeply analyze situations. I am an extremely fast learner. I seem to be good at meta-thinking, or being conscious of my own thoughts. I am deeply affected by the emotions and moods of others. (This can be wonderful—and disastrous if I cannot also detangle myself from their mood.) I am especially cognizant of other people’s sensitivities. I’m creative, and tend toward being fairly intuitive. I am compassionate, and I feel a special bond with the elderly, and newborns. After all, I can relate: the world must seem like a fairly daunting place when all your bones are breaking—or for that matter, have yet to fully fuse.
But those things don’t seem like much of a fair trade. Most people don’t get it. They don’t want to get it. And why should they. It is YOU (and by you I mean me) who are in the minority. Therefore, sheer numbers suggests that it’s not THEM who should change the way they go about doing things. Besides, they like their Axe body spray, their Febreze, their cashmere woods and plumberry velour-scented candle. (God forbid the house should smell like whatever the hell a house would normally smell like.)
They can wolf down a BK Triple Stacker, French Fries, Coke, and follow it up an hour later with a bacon pizza and six-pack of Pabst (hey, it’s evidently hip beer again, and not the swill of the piss poor). Such fare might literally kill me—or make me wish I were dead.) Even my intestines are highly sensitive. (Does HSP stand for Highly Sensational Pooping, then?) That’s what Irritable Bowel Syndrome—from which I have suffered, inexplicably, since I turned twenty—is all about: a digestive system that is hyper-reactive to stimulus. In this case, stimulus being food, for God’s sake. And stress. And laughter. Crying. Yelling. It’s all connected, praise Jesus. What amazing and complex creatures we are!
What purpose does this serve? Somebody tell me . . .
Aron suggests that the other roughly 80 percent of the population who do not appear to share this extreme degree of sensitivity may be quite useful in society for rushing into things without too much concern for examining every angle or every nuance and consequence. They are the explorers, the fighters, the ones willing to charge at the woolly mammoths with spears (spears we helped them make because we noticed the way that certain rocks would chip into pieces that developed sharp edges, don’t you know). She also suggests (I’m sure she must be kidding) that there are so many more of these types because they tend to be killed faster as a result.
The other twenty percent remain alert for danger (everywhere!), the needs of the tribe, the comings and goings of other animals, where there might be food to eat, the better way to make a house, a fire, a basket. We create things. Then we improve them. So what if our motivation is because we’re constantly looking for ways to be comfortable? After all, necessity is the mother of invention. We’re the first ones to feel desperately cold and hungry and to wonder just why in the hell we’re sleeping on a cave floor every night, so likely, we’re the first to want to do something about it.
Right. I know. You might not buy into all this highly sensitive person crap. But there are numerous studies that have been completed on human tolerance levels—after all, the military has to understand a little something about transmarginal inhibition in order to do all of the lovely things it does to create soldiers (and torture people, but we won’t go into that now). But that’s not what this blog is about. It’s not even me trying to convince you that you should be nicer to your friendly, neighborhood HSP (although you should, and turn your fucking music down while you’re at it). Nor is it me trying to convince my fellow HSPs that they should go ahead and resign themselves to sitting in their house night after night, and that’s it’s okay to do so, because they’re sensitive, and what else can they do?
I have to imagine there’s a way for those of us who are “gifted” with this sensitivity to both embrace and overcome it. As in, by recognizing it, we can work with it. We can manipulate it. We can build a shield, a psychic guard, a Dogan (for those Dark Tower fans out there), which is a control room of sorts, filled with switches, where we can go inside our heads and start fiddling with the volume knobs. Obviously, the more we attempt to avoid any sort of stimulation, the more likely we are to be overstimulated the moment we step out the front door. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought about going to live in a cave, but in reality, I wouldn’t last a day. After all, it’s not heated. Also, it probably smells damp. I bet there’s water dripping somewhere. (Chinese water torture!) It’s dark. I can’t microwave filtered water for my ginger tea. That’s a deal breaker right there. So, no cave. That leaves me with Plan B, which is to search for ways to work with this thin skin, to seek out ways to make it feel just a little bit less like the world outside my front door is a giant piece of steel wool in disguise, scraping away at the tenderest bits of flesh.
This is that journey. The Urban Hermit blogs are my way of attempting to shine a light into the well. My steps out into the world as an HSP. And some days, that may mean a Highly Sensitive Person, or it may mean a Highly Strange Person, or a person with Highly Sagacious Perceptions and Highly Strange Preferences. I won’t stand on ceremony here, and I won’t tell you fairy stories about how my sensitivities are so wonderful and amazing and therefore something to be uplifted. I’m not entirely certain that’s true, just as I imagine it’s also not entirely false.
All I know for certain is that there is life out there. It’s happening right now. Music. Laughter. Poetry. Art. Movies. Fellowship. Wherever there are people, and sights, and sounds, and smells—in other words, places you’d normally be unlikely to find me—I will now, not so boldly, try to go. I don’t believe there’s a magic cure, but I do believe that there IS a way that we can use our sensitivities to witness more of this world, and to share our discoveries with others (meaning those 80 percent who have no idea what I’m talking about).
See you out there.