On being highly sensitive and depressed
and finding my way to the ancestors.
I was born with my heart in my hands. It beats for all to see, vulnerable and on display. I have few memories of my infancy and childhood. I experienced the world raw. My heart sensed everything and my mind could not comprehend. It left me disassociated and depressed. I gathered what context I could from my friends on Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers, later it was Saved By The Bell, the Golden Girls and MTV, but always, in my mind my world made no sense, I made no sense. Needless to say, I am incredibly sensitive.
Soft, pulsing, bloody, and exposed.
How does one survive with heart in their hands? I survived with fear as my guide. Only as of very recently, have I understood how afraid I am. Guarding against disappointed eyes, and harsh tones. Existing only enough to not be noticed. As a child I began constructing walls between heart and self. Then I retreated into the flickering lights and loving characters of television. I watched tv. Like a lot. Adventures abound, peril is fought and conquered in 30 minutes or less, any number of friends are always there at the click of a button, built just for you. It was the perfect retreat, my heart was safely locked away on the outside of the walls.
I’ve read that wisdom is the opposite of fear. Not the wisdom of knowing, or believing you know all there is to know, that just leads back to walls of fear by another name — ego, hubris. Those fears revolve around a practice of control and dominion, which signals a loss of possibility, connection and therefore wisdom. Rather, at the heart of wisdom lies the infinite, the possibility of all hurts, loves, twists, turns, connections, and failures, and in so being fear becomes impossible. One could say wisdom is the key to unlocking fear. The mechanism of control that lies at the base of fear becomes disabled and walls are no longer an option and disintegrate.
My bookshelf by my bed has evolved over one year’s time away from farming and floristry (my “career” as it crumbles right now) to the topics of: ancestry healing (books, tarot, an altar) trauma support and embodiment guides, herbalism, (my) ancestral as well as indigenous spiritual wisdom, psychology, science fiction, black and eco feminism, as well as resources written by folks who identify ADHD and Autistic (for I have recently, at 41, been diagnosed with both.) Oh, and Lord of the Rings. At any one time I am reading no less than five books. I feel grateful to live in a time where I can immerse my mind in the words of incredible visionaries and be held. Where all possibilities exist and fear has no place to get a hold and slips away page by page. Where, over the course of one year’s time I have been able to meander and move into news levels of understanding and intelligence regarding my physical being. Until I put the book down and I come face to face with the wall.
Could it be that books have become what tv was when I was a child? A place of refuge within the wall. Not only are people hesitant to break into the trance of a human with a book, they are literally the perfect wall — solid, acceptable, knowledgeable, even wise.
These pages, written by doctors and psychologists, professionals and coaches, dreamers and visionaries, activists and ecologists, all penning their wisdom down into complete thoughts and how to steps with various levels of digestibility and accessibility, have been a lifeline. I feel better surrounded by books. Their potential and the collective encouragement that things can get better fills me with hope.
However, their words are not mine. Their wisdom is not mine. It is precisely that they are NOT my words that keep me locked away, on the inside of the wall. They have traveled their path, lived their life, and I have not. Am not. I cannot live behind their words no matter how beautifully written or acceptable they are. I have to write my own story.
The great tragedy of living with a heart on the other side of a wall is that it means there is no heart on the inside. I can’t access it out there on the other side and on the inside that leaves only vast emptiness. There’s a sense that something is missing in the day to day. Moments are sharpened by the intense sensation of a feeling, like a pounding, an earthquake, that rattles the walls but is senseless and disorienting. There’s something on the other side- powerful, beautiful, magnificent. How can I have her? I’m completely desperate to have her. Blood thirsty and yearning. I’ve seen hints, through cracks. She has my husband’s eyes, and my daughters’ laughter. She smells like the earth, tastes like brine, and moves like fire. She reaches for me with such familiarity and yet I cannot seem to take her hand. I can only stand frozen and alone on the inside.
Does the answer seem so clear to you? Take down the damn bricks gurl and be done with it. Claim your truth, stand in self, hear your calling, ra ra ra! Thing is, if I take down the wall, I’m still left with a pile of fucking bricks. What do you do with a ton of bricks other than rebuild the wall. It’s then a logic game, a mind game, a click and drag and drop. Replace one step with another. One task with another, one job for another, one relationship with another, one style for another, what is the right answer this time? Fear. Wall. Repeat. The underlying reason for the wall to exist is still there and so it continues, reinforced with time.
I want to sculpt. I want to create. I want to manipulate each brick that I’ve carefully laid, examine and consume their truth one at a painstaking time. I want to dance with or smash them or throw or dissolve or claw or burn them. I want to intricately and meticulously rebuild beauty with my bare hands. I want to exist so deeply in fear that it opens up before me in all it’s possibilities so that I do not have to be afraid any more.
For now, I’m stuck, staring at a wall. For now…
Being highly sensitive isn’t something you cure. It’s not healable and you can’t train your nervous system out of it. It’s fundamental to who you are, for better or worse. It’s tightly woven into the fabric of my being. It’s what my brain, and body have developed around and according to since inception. Unfortunately that sensitivity got coupled with fear long ago and was overcome by fear’s power.
For example, the primary thesis in Gabor Maté’s book Scattered, is that high sensitivity is the lone genetic marker for the developmental disability of ADD. Whether ADD becomes a disability depends on the presence of stress or trauma in childhood. Trauma — one’s experience of fear.
In The Orchid and The Dandelion author Thomas Boyce explains that it is not the presence of high sensitivity that dooms a human to depression, anxiety and other mental disabilities, it’s that high sensitivity coupled with stress and trauma have a exorbitantly higher effect on an orchid, or highly sensitive child, than a dandelion, or robust child. In contrast, he continues, in the absence of trauma or presence of unconditional support, orchid children thrive as much or more than the dandelion child.
In his book, Maté goes on to examine the complexity of ADD and high sensitivity in the context of intergenerational and cultural trauma. His detailed and nuanced account of how acutely an embryo/infant/child that is highly sensitive can be impacted by social, cultural, and multigenerational familial stress is comforting and a calling to me. Intuitively I have deeply felt the world’s pain all my life, it’s pounded on my walls for over 40 years. A little over a year ago now, despite the harsh pounding I realized a whisper, a calling rhythm, ever so slight, not always present, but definitely there. As I started to turn into it, I could feel it turning in reciprocity, pulling me in. I feel it as a pulling, an opening and softening in my heart. It’s the same feeling I have when I am truly able to be present and hold my daughters in a time of need or in the quiet moments with my bare feet firmly planted on the earth, or in the silent grounded space of my partner. What I’ve come to understand is that in those moments, I am receiving from my ancestors. I am being called forward by them to begin the healing process for us all. They are singing to me, pouring love into my outstretched heart so that I may carry our family forward into light and into love. I can see that the wall, our wall, stretches far back into time, long before I was born. They no longer want to be burdened with it’s upkeep and do not want us, the decedents, to be limited by it’s fear. Spirit has blessed me with so many gifts in this life, including my high sensitivity and all of the forms and ways it has coalesced into my being. In my good days I can include the trauma in the list of gifts because I know I would not have heard the whisper without them.
But in my bad days, hard days, overstimulated, disoriented and depressed days I will still find comfort behind the wall, in whatever form I have sculpted it up and to that point.
