Jenna Forrest on being young and sensitive
“I’ll cry at anything, even a tissue commercial. I’m overly sensitive. It’s so easy to hurt my feelings.” Mandy Moore [From the page Intensity - sensitivity]
Being highly sensitive affects even people who choose very public careers, like acting and singing - and it is not so unusual - Elaine Aron [author of The Highly Sensitive Person] says “About 15 to 20 percent of the population have this trait. It means you are aware of subtleties in your surroundings, a great advantage in many situations. It also means you are more easily overwhelmed…” [from the Highly Sensitive blog]
In her article Every Blessing and Curse is a Choice. Choose the Blessing!, Jenna Forrest writes, “I would bet that a lot of us were fully prepared for our own funerals by about age seven, figuring that we were soon going to die from sensory overload.
“From the very beginning, the world was stirring me like a whisk. Life in general felt upside down, inside out and backwards. From my three-foot tall childhood viewpoint, my city looked littered; the music in our house was too loud; chemical cleaners and detergents smelled too strong; and cars sped too fast. Sensing the bad mood of every stranger walking down the street didn’t help.”
She also quotes from her book: Help Is On Its Way: A True Story :
“I’ve always gotten praised for taking the least amount of space, being the quietest, giving up the good seats for a spot on the floor, eating the leftovers in the fridge, and making use of the hand-me-downs everybody else is too good for. I must’ve gotten so used to it that I’ve picked up the habit of choosing the worst for myself on my own, even when my family isn’t around to praise me for it.”
But that kind of self-limiting behavior and pain can be turned around, Forrest notes; we can learn to work with “the sticky chaos of our overloaded psyches” as she puts it:
“Knowing that we deserve the best that life has to offer brings us every ounce of power we ever needed to help and inspire others.
“That awareness of personal merit is the magic that turns every perceived curse into the true blessing that awaits.”
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