No more peas, please
I was nearly knocked over by a noxious scent the moment I walked into the room. It smelled like chemical powder had been applied liberally to every surface. The couch, the carpet, the walls . . . but I have a feeling it was actually on someone’s skin. It burned my eyes and nose. It made my stomach tense. I felt a bit like I couldn’t breathe (probably because I was holding my breath), and that, in turn, made me feel a little claustrophobic. There is nothing sadder to me than to be around a group of beautiful spirits but to fail in fully appreciating it due to a reaction I’m having to something in my environment. (And by sad, I also mean frustrating and infuriating, where the fury is directly pointed at myself.)
This was my first experience attending a Women’s Spirituality Group. On that particular night, the group was having Children’s Story sharing, in which the members brought in memorable stories from their childhood and shared them with the group. One member chose to share the story of The Princess and the Pea, by Hans Christian Andersen.
This story rescued me in a sense, as the distraction of it (and the stories that followed) were perhaps the only reason I was able to stay and endure the full two hours. My desire to escape certainly wasn’t due to the company! The women were wonderful. It was so nice to be around a group whose primary power cells were not fueled by testosterone. Also, the women were kind and understanding enough to open a door for me to the outside, which at least allowed me to take shallow breaths. Can I sit outside, I wondered, and just sort of poke my head in? Of course, I then found myself feeling guilty and worried about everyone else’s comfort level. Are you warm enough? I wanted to ask. Can I give you my sweater? Typical HSP behavior.
But I digress. We were talking about a fairytale. It was just when I thought I had reached my breaking point and was going to have to get up and leave that someone began reading The Princess and the Pea. A voice inside me told me I needed to hear this, so I took another quick shallow sip of the air around me and prepared to listen.
The story goes like this:
The Princess on the Pea (aka The Princess and the Pea)
A translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Prindsessen paa Ærten” by Jean Hersholt
Once there was a Prince who wanted to marry a Princess. Only a real one would do. So he traveled through all the world to find her, and everywhere things went wrong. There were Princesses aplenty, but how was he to know whether they were real Princesses? There was something not quite right about them all. So he came home again and was unhappy, because he did so want to have a real Princess.
One evening a terrible storm blew up. It lightened and thundered and rained. It was really frightful! In the midst of it all came a knocking at the town gate. The old King went to open it.
Who should be standing outside but a Princess, and what a sight she was in all that rain and wind. Water streamed from her hair down her clothes into her shoes, and ran out at the heels. Yet she claimed to be a real Princess.
“We’ll soon find that out,” the old Queen thought to herself. Without saying a word about it she went to the bedchamber, stripped back the bedclothes, and put just one pea in the bottom of the bed. Then she took twenty mattresses and piled them on the pea. Then she took twenty eiderdown feather beds and piled them on the mattresses. Up on top of all these the Princess was to spend the night.
In the morning they asked her, “Did you sleep well?”
“Oh!” said the Princess. “No. I scarcely slept at all. Heaven knows what’s in that bed. I lay on something so hard that I’m black and blue all over. It was simply terrible.”
They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate. So the Prince made haste to marry her, because he knew he had found a real Princess.
As for the pea, they put it in the museum. There it’s still to be seen, unless somebody has taken it.
There, that’s a true story.
I think we can all agree that the princess was a highly sensitive person! There has been much debate as to whether Andersen was making a statement about the supreme sensitivity he felt was afforded the upper class and royalty (or in his case, the Danish bourgeoisie). After all, peasants do not have the luxury of being sensitive and delicate of nature. Or perhaps the sensitivity might have been a metaphor for a special kind of woman’s depth of feeling and compassion.
Critics (specifically Toksvig in 1934) suggested that young girls might get the notion from such stories that great ladies must also be thin-skinned (it appears that the idea of being thin-skinned was frowned upon in that day and age as well). Or perhaps it was an indication of poor manners (which I also imagined, since regardless of tossing and turning on top of what might have felt like the Rock of Gibraltar, I would have told my hosts that I slept like a baby. Why should they feel bad?). In this case, a Princess is someone who is hypersensitive to physical conditions to a fault, or one who complains about trivialities and demands special treatment.
It might surprise you to know that I have been called a Princess a time or two. Ha! Believe me, it was not meant as a compliment. It was not said by a Prince who valued (or heaven forbid cultivated) my sensitivity and saw it as an indication of my great depth of feeling and compassion. It was taken to indicate that I am hypersensitive to a fault; a complainer about trivialities, which might then lead me to demand special treatment.
I admit. When I heard the story again in the Women’s Group, I laughed—especially in light of the fact that I was tossing and turning right that moment on a pea of sorts, and I couldn’t possibly have felt less princessly in the positive sense of the word. So, how did I feel about Andersen’s princess now? Did I think she was a complainer? Did I think her sensitivity was ridiculous? Hmm . . . As I said before, I would never have spoken up about my discomfort unless I happened to be staying at my mother’s house (if I can’t complain there, where can I complain?). Then again, I’d just told a group of women who were complete strangers that I was reacting poorly to something in the room—which is pretty much just shy of telling everyone they reek of chemicals. So okay, maybe I was just as rude. But was her sensitivity ridiculous?
Well, I have to say yes. But am I only saying that because society (those 80 percent who would have felt nothing beneath them) has told me over and over again that I am too sensitive? That my sensitivity is a bad thing, something to be fought against at all costs? Probably. It has and perhaps still is my fervent wish to be able to Turn Down the Volume on my sensitivity (Let’s TDV the HSP!). To just dial it back a notch or two (or ten) so that I can see what the rest of the world has been seeing all this time. But would I want to live that way permanently?
Would I trade my ability to see deeper in to things, to SEE MORE CONNECTIONS, to notice the things that others do not (these Highly Sagacious Perceptions, if you will), for the chance to walk through life unencumbered by this thin skin?
I thought about this while I ran errands—first, to Lowe’s to buy a furnace filter, which promises on its label to have a 1900 Microparticle Performance Rating. This baby is Maximum! It’s bright white accordion folds are mountains of electrostatic fibers, attracting and capturing a myriad of unseen creepies and crawlies, which have been illustrated on the plastic insert—things like little paisley swirls of pollen, mites enlarged to the size of rats, mold spores that look like castanets, puffy particles that carry viruses with jagged teeth, noxious smoke, terrible smells, bacteria, New York-style smog, plus pet dander (which is represented by a cat snuggling against a dog in a way that my cat and dog most certainly do not. So in all, I’m left to feel supremely confident that this puppy is going to turn my musty air into puffs of pure baby angel breaths.
Would I give up my sensitivity to save $19 every month on a filter that, at best, makes me sneeze a little less when the furnace kicks on?
Next, I was off to the grocery store, where I would spend $100 on three days’ worth of food that was Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Soy free, High Fructose Corn Syrup free, Organic, and also perhaps Prayed over by Hindu Swamies, just for good measure.
Would I give up my sensitivity to drive to Wendy’s and order an Asiago Ranch Chicken Club, French Fries, and a Caramel Apple Frosty Parfait? Followed up with a cigarette . . . and then a beer?
The answer, I discovered, exhausted and broke, would be YES!
Even if it meant you couldn’t write again, the way that you do? I asked myself.
Yes!!
Even if it meant you would end up being, sort of . . . well, normal?
Yes!!
And dumb?
Wait a minute! I know a lot of people who don’t have even half of my level of sensitivity, and they certainly aren’t dumb. So this seemed like an extreme. This was me trying to rally myself, since I realized that this line of questioning was all irrelevant. So far, there was no enchanted pill or potion or incantation or diet or meditation, or crystal pendant, or opening of the chakras, or light therapy, or hormone therapy, or shock therapy, or lobotomy (wait, haven’t tried that one yet) that had magically rendered me capable of dialing back my . . . affectability.
So, there it is. I am a princess, and I can feel the pea. I suppose the consolation is that I feel a lot of other things, too. Compassion. In spades. Love for the downtrodden and misunderstood. Empathy for the lonely and hurting. In a world where I rarely feel comfortable, I want for nothing but comfort for YOU.
For instance, if you’re the sort to like mustard, I’m the sort to spend my last dime making certain that there are no less than five kinds of the best for you to choose from when you come to my house. I might, however, ask you to roll around out in the grass first, so as to mask the smell of your scented deodorant.