Ghosts
Dance Me to the End of Love
This is the first record I ever bought with my own money. That was 44 years ago.
44 years. So endless. So fleeting. We don’t know where that time goes, but we know this: After awhile, this week, too, will go there.
Projection
OMG, I thought I was the only one who had a hard time parting with the colored paper clips!
This is a lovely little video that every HSP will want to bookmark for those days when there is just too much of everything going on, and you catch yourself wondering wistfully how the other 80% lives.
To see more of my favorite videos on sensitivity, visit my YouTube HSP Playlist.
Encouragement
Here’s a Ted Talk on sensitivity you will want to bookmark. Elena Herdieckerhoff’s description of sensitivity as being “in permanent osmosis with everything around you” is so right! Not only is she informative and entertaining (with a charming accent), but she embodies the subtle strength of HSPs. I’ve been feeling it for awhile, but I haven’t found the right word to express the power that lies in accepting ourselves even as we openly acknowledge our lack of armor. Maybe the word I’m looking for is “courage.”
Elena’s talk also reminds us that many of the negative reactions directed towards HSPs, whether they be men or women, are firmly rooted in sexism. The notion that emotion and reaction are feminine, and therefore an expression of weakness, is wrong on all counts. Emotionality and reactivity are not weaknesses, there is nothing inherently female about them, and last but not least, there is nothing weak or inferior about women!
But it’s hard to find words that express vulnerability AND strength. Impossible in fact. Check a thesaurus. All of the synonyms for vulnerability reference weakness and/or helplessness. And the lack of a conception of vulnerable strength is as bad for strength as it is for vulnerability. The synonyms for strength reference force, violence and domination. Before the world becomes a better place for HSPs, I think we will have to coin some new terms.
Happy, Shmappy
This entertaining illustrated post by graphic artist Matthew Inman explores happiness fascism, a subject I have addressed once or twice myself. He pillories the vague definition of “happiness,” and compares and contrasts it with meaningfulness, proposing creative flow as a variant of happiness, or at least as a modifier of unhappiness.
I nodded my head all the way through this, but in the end, I don’t entirely agree. Continue reading
Take Me Away From All This Death
Over the past few months, my life has been touched by death repeatedly. Cultural icons of my youth are dropping left and right, and I’ve learned a new hesitation to track down old friends and acquaintances. I’ve known elders who commented that everyone they knew was dead or dying, but I hadn’t expected to experience that in middle age. It has suddenly become difficult to ignore the inevitability of my own death, which I had fully expected to go on denying for another two or three decades, at minimum.
Continue reading
Being the Peace
I’m so angry today. I don’t know who to be angry at — but I’m furious! I don’t know what to do — but something must be done! So much must be done, where to even start? This is unacceptable! Yet I have to find a way to accept it.
When I go to work, there is a little shrine on the sidewalk across the street from my office. This is where a 17 year old girl lay yesterday, after a stray bullet from someone else’s conflict smashed into – and ended – her life. Sitting at my desk, I heard that bullet.
Now, the shrine. While I gather windblown flowers and compose a note about senseless waste, other office workers from neighboring buildings stop by. We piece together our bits of the puzzle. There’s security camera footage that might help. Good.
Later, a crowd gathers – a very quiet crowd. I give up trying to concentrate on work and go down to see what’s happening. The street is partially blocked by people with “Stop the Violence” signs. Other survivors of other murders speak, sad and angry and trying to make sense of it. Then the man who called the gathering says, “Be the peace.”
I see at once that I am not being the peace. I’m too angry sad anxious frustrated disgusted frightened. There’s no peace in me right now. And there isn’t a lot of peace in the gathering, which I have to leave to return to work. It’s not so quiet anymore. But the anger and frustration I can still hear through my open window aren’t making me as anxious and stressed as angry crowds usually do. Today I can relate.
Yet even if I don’t remotely resemble the peace at the moment, or maybe because of that, I can see how being the peace makes sense. Which is saying something in the face of so much senselessness. Unlike all the macro “out there” things – the wounds to heal, the minds to change, the mountains to move – the choice in every moment whether to be the peace (or not) is entirely in each person’s power. Maybe it’s the only thing that really is.
Can I find my own way to being the peace? I don’t know. You’d think if it was easy I’d have already done it. But maybe I just never thought about it that way before. In any case, I’m sure going to try.
Introvale is a State of Mind
I’ve been hearing buzz about Medium here and there for awhile now. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s a newish online sharing platform meant for deeper, more thoughtful articles and responses than social media and commercial sharing venues typically offer.
Social “Medium” for Introverts
That sounds like something designed by (and for) introverts, no?
But I’ve been scrambling to make financial ends at least wave at each other from opposite ends of the block, so it wasn’t until tonight that I finally took a look.
I didn’t look far before I found Multitasking is Killing Your Brain. Hah! I was right! It’s a den of introverts! Here I was thinking Introvale was a physical space. Silly me.
Quiet Revisited
Jenna, my comrade in bloggery over at The Wishing Well, just published a post about Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. To my great surprise, her reaction to it was very different from mine. Since I had recommended it to her enthusiastically, I started out writing a reply in a comment, but it became way too long, so I’m publishing it here.
Wow, did we read the same book? Before I read Quiet, it had literally never crossed my mind that I was an introvert, much less an HSP (which Elaine Aron believes Susan Cain also is). I thought I was an extrovert inhibited by a tendency to isolate. I defended this, extolling the joys of solitude, as I still do. However, before I read Quiet, those joys were seriously undermined by my secret fear that solitude was an unhealthy indulgence, an escape from my shameful inability to interact “normally.” Whether it was my failure to produce extroverted bubble and bounce on command, or my persistent inclination towards behavior I had been taught was dysfunctional, I was coming up short no matter what I did. Continue reading
How the Light Gets In
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets inLeonard Cohen
sensitive type 