The Thing That Stops Us
When at any given moment — we could
The thing is we could, actually. We could do things in a heartbeat.
We could say I love you. We could approach that guy/girl and start a conversation. We could talk to them and tell them we like them. We could ask them out on a date and we could kiss them.
We could go home. We could tell mom and dad we love them. We could tell them we miss them and we could hug them.
We could cry, we could laugh, we could scream, we could sing and we could dance.
We could quit that nine to five because we’re done. We could take the risk and leap because we’ve been dreaming about that.
We could actually. We could because we can. Then why didn’t we? What’s this thing that stops us from being truly free?
The Fear
You’ve probably heard it before. Book after book, blog post after blog post — about fear, doubts, anxiety, circumstances. You name it. We know our fears better than anyone, yet we’re still not able to stop it from stopping us.
So maybe there’s something else to it; something entirely different.
I was sitting at the college library one day mulling over all of the decisions I have made. All the things I’ve done and all the things that I’m yet to do all hinge upon fear.
‘Well, maybe it's fear,’ I thought. We are fearful creatures after all. We were taught to fear a lot of things since we were kids. But when I think about it a little bit more, we weren’t really taught to fear things like love, making friends, confessing, or even public speaking.
In fact, our parents were behind us, during that play in third grade or that spontaneous speaking contest in fifth grade, cheering “have courage!” and mouthing “you can do it”.
But there we are, with shaking knees, sweating hands and shallow breaths, so close to a panic attack that we wish for the earth to cave in on us and eat us whole, terrified of those things that shouldn’t really be scary at all.
I’m a nervous and anxious person, I have to admit. I was sitting in the library killing time because I came one and a half hour early for my next class. I don’t want to be late because being late makes me nervous.
I was sitting in the library because I didn’t want to be in the cafeteria or someplace else because my classmates might be there and they might see me alone and they might approach me and start talking to me and I’m not really a good conversationalist and I might get tongue-tied or worse, word vomit and I might do something stupid and damn!
The list goes on, longer than the Nile river.
It was exhausting. I was exhausted.
I want to snap out of my senses. I thought of dancing, and singing and jumping and running. I want to jolt myself out. I want to gain momentum and I knew I could if only I would.
Behind my quiet and constrained facade, there’s another version of me. The convivial type. The loud, sociable and good-humored person. The fearless risk-taker. The life of the party.
I’ve learned to dissect the many emotions that I feel following fear. This involves the feeling of anxiety, shame, embarrassment, humiliation, disgust, disappointment, sadness, hope, longing, and sentiment.
It’s a stockpile of overwhelming emotions which incapacitates me from seizing the moment and doing the act. It’s not fear alone, but a set of heavy intense emotions that arise from our innermost self.
Are You a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)?
This notion may not apply to everyone. There are certain circumstances or factors that might hinder some people from carrying out particular actions — like trauma, phobias, allergies, and even illness.
But here, I want to focus on the cognitive emotions that affect our day to day decisions, and why some of us don’t do the things that we want to do even though we know we could.
In Stephen Chbosky’s novel, ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’, Charlie’s English teacher Mr. Anderson tells him that “sometimes, people use thought to not participate in life.” I guess that’s that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
In the novel, Charlie suffers from clinical depression and is unbearably shy. But despite his introversion, he’s undeniably artistic and perceptive of the world around him. In my own observation and perception of Charlie’s disposition, he’s a type of person that probably has a highly-sensitive nervous system.
People with a highly-sensitive nervous system usually have a strong response to the things around them and events in their lives. They tend to feel things ten times as strong than those less sensitive than them.
They’d also be likely to be overwhelmed with all of the intense emotions, leaving them to feel overly aroused and exhausted. These series of emotions and thoughts incapacitate sensitive people from ‘participating’ and being present out there in a loud and impervious world.
Sensitive people are more aware of the subtleties around them. They tend to notice every tiny glitch because their senses are different and well-developed in a neurological way. In her book, The Highly Sensitive Person, Psychologist Elaine Aron describes the distinction of a highly-sensitive person (HSP) from those who are less sensitive:
“Most people walk into a room and perhaps notice the furniture, the people — that’s about it. HSPs can be instantly aware whether they wish to be or not, of the mood, the friendships, and enmities, the freshness or staleness of the air and the personality of the one who arranged the flowers.”
Being a highly sensitive person is like having an extra reactiveness capacity or a sixth sense or something. All these emotions can cause arousal or anything that awakens the nervous system. Arousal, however, is different from fear and anxiety.
As Aron writes,
“Fear creates arousal, but so do many other emotions, including joy, curiosity, or anger. But we can also be over-aroused by semiconscious thoughts or low levels of excitement that create no obvious emotion.”
The Fight-Flight-Freeze Response
As human beings, we develop our own self-protective mechanism to help us survive. American Physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon describes this mechanism as the Fight-Flight-Freeze response (FFF). It as a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived threat to survival.
Have you ever have that feeling of being in a social situation where all of a sudden, your heartbeat starts to quicken, your thoughts races in all directions and there seems to be a storm going on in your stomach. This is an example of arousal. The more you try to calm yourself, the more it gets worse.
We perceive the things around us as a threat or a danger, may it be physically or psychologically. All of these feelings result in the fight-flight-freeze response. First, we contemplate whether to fight or to run. And having no idea what is the best option to pick, we tend to play safe and we just freeze. This mechanism is highly common for HSP’s.
Ten Mindful Minutes
In my own experiences as a qualified HSP, I tend to feel over-aroused by loud bombarding music, parties, noisy environments, crowded places, the rush of traffic, and even headlights of vehicles at night.
I have gone to parties and gatherings but I don’t usually last longer than 10 minutes. It frustrates me because I want to be there. I dream of being the life of the party. But I would often found myself standing on the corner, doing nothing but feeling everything.
Taking a ten-mindful minute break is not stopping. It’s more like acknowledging your presence and slowly accepting things as they are and shedding the skin of anxiety and fear to be able to be there exactly where you are, physically and mindfully.
Going back to Chbosky’s novel, the thing that stops Charlie from ‘participating’ is his sensitivity. His thoughts would pelt down simultaneously, leaving him too overwhelmed to do the act. He struggles with having to bear the brunt of being sensitive and thinking that something is wrong with him but having no idea what is.
“You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things.” — The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
Being a highly sensitive person can be extremely hard and drudging as other people view us to be demanding, vulnerable and overly dramatic.
But from a disparate perspective, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having such an intense and diverse characteristic.
Being highly sensitive means you empathize, understand and see the world through a different lens than most. At times, we, the diverse sensitive ones will feel everything all at once and we just stop. We’re awed. We feel infinite. And that in itself is uniquely beautiful.
“I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them. Because it’s okay to feel things and be who you are about them.” — Stephen Chbosky-The Perks of Being A Wallflower
