My Childhood Experience of Being “Too Sensitive.”

Even as a child, this being “too sensitive” had often left me feeling as if the world was too much for me. It was too big, too large, too hurtful. One of my earliest memories is of walking to a neighborhood Delhi market with my naani (my maternal grandmother) for some errands she had to do.   

My family stayed in a small government DDA flat, and in the evenings, we often wound our way through the neighborhood parks to go to the market.

It was the kind of market that sits next to blocks upon blocks of low apartment buildings that you find in that part of the world. It had a grocery shop, a tailor, a stationery shop plus a halwai (sweet seller). If you walked further down from the concrete marketplace, in the evenings, you would find an entire road taken over by vegetable and fruit-sellers with their hand-pulled carts.

Often, as a child and definitely when my naani was visiting, there was some kind of treat involved in these evening outings. We would finish our chores and then buy some syrupy-golden jalebis from the halwai. Afterwards, we would thread our way through a jumble of people to get to the vegetable market.

It was a place I dreaded as a little child. On busy evenings, there was the din of people haggling. Sometimes, there was pushing and shoving, jostling for space. But to get to it, we had to first walk in front of a row of beggars sitting on the pavement – old men and women huddled under their blankets in that smoky, foggy Delhi winter.

Sometimes, we stopped to give them some change. Sometimes, we just passed them by.

I remember coming home after many of these outings and hiding to cry. There was so much suffering in the world, so much pain and just by going out, by being near these people, I had absorbed it. It was as if their pain had seeped inside me, colored me through. I couldn’t control it.

Even as a child of six or seven, I knew it was weak to cry like this. So, when we reached home, I would escape to another room to cry by myself. I had to get over it, I would tell myself, shaking with sobs. I might be shamed for going on like this, and I didn’t want to feel hurt by that, on top of the pain I was already feeling.

In the beginning, I hadn’t quite been able to do this. Trying to scold myself into not crying didn’t work. But over time, I would become a little better at numbing myself, turning away from that pain, escaping up into my mind. This was one of my early experiences of my sensitivity.

This is an excerpt from my memoir The Empath’s Journey. Set during the first few years after I emigrated from India to the United States, it talks about rewriting my relationship with my sensitivity and my journey of discovering tools and techniques to channel its gifts in my life.