As a highly sensitive person & an INFP personality type, I don’t do well with strict goals and plans. Action steps don’t seem to motivate me in the same way they do other personality types. Instead, I like to follow my feelings, intuitions, and hunches.
I like that feeling of precious possibility that makes life beautiful.
But there is, of course, a downside to this. Sometimes, not having a plan can mean you are following the path of least resistance. It’s easy to make up excuses and reasons for not doing something. And one of my “justifiable excuses” is the way I have arranged my life to avoid overwhelm as a highly sensitive person.
I have all these half-articulated rules in my mind about how to navigate the world as a creative highly sensitive person.
Anything that creates overwhelm is not welcome. So, I shop during non-peak times, take vacations where there’s plenty of unscheduled time and no frantic running-around, and have rules for myself like only buying magazines when I travel and not in day-to-day life (to avoid clutter).
All this is good. All this does help me take care of my needs.
But sometimes, avoiding overwhelm can become a blanket principle, and I’ve gotten into a habit of avoiding overwhelm at all costs. But of course, some things are worth the hassle and the overwhelm. So, lately, I have decided to be more mindful about why and when I am trying to avoid overwhelm.
Could embracing overwhelm be worth it sometimes as a highly sensitive person?
Last year, I practiced this a little. While I was in India in November, I taught a writing workshop in New Delhi at the media arts institute where I did my first-ever creative writing course more than eight years ago.
When I was coordinating the date for the workshop from here in the States, I wanted to make sure that it would happen in the second half of my trip. I didn’t want it to happen in the first week or so.
I get very jetlagged when I go to India. It takes around 24 hours, including layover time, to fly from San Francisco to New Delhi. So, I usually want to take it easy for the first five or six days, which is the amount of time it takes to adjust to the time difference (India is literally the other side of the world. It’s day there when it’s night here in the States.)
So, I tried my best to avoid having the workshop during the first week of my stay there.
But try as I might, we just couldn’t figure out a suitable date. I was reaching on Wednesday. The only good option was the coming Saturday.
I decided to go for it. Yes, I didn’t know how jetlagged I would be. Yes, it felt very overwhelming to first fly all that way and then be inundated by the sensory overload that is Delhi. I was not sure whether I would sleep properly and be rested enough to do the workshop.
But I decided to take on the uncertainty. Over the years, I have also gotten a lot better at managing my energy when I travel. So, I knew I had that on my side. And I decided that I could let go of needing to control everything in advance.
When the workshop day came, I did feel overwhelmed, partly because of my energy levels and partly because of performance pressure. I didn’t feel ready. What if someone asked me a question I didn’t have the answer to? What if I was ungrounded and couldn’t remember details?
So, I did feel all of this overwhelm.
But I also found out that in the end, I did pretty well.
I wasn’t perfect. I could have been better. I wasn’t an A+ but I was definitely “good.”
Maybe, always grading everything I do and not being okay with an A- or B+ is the enemy of excellence because doing the workshop was an experience I can now learn from.
I was expecting around 5-10 people to show up. But I ended up teaching a three-hour workshop to almost 30 students of the creative writing course.
The experience gave me a tangible understanding of the things I do well and the things I can improve. I took longer with the introductions than needed, and because I was a little nervous, I didn’t respond as well as I could have a couple of times. But I also empathized and offered some new insights.
This experience showed me that I didn’t need to always avoid overwhelm as a highly sensitive person and emotional empath.
I don’t need to talk myself out of doing things just because they are inconvenient. I also don’t need to be completely in control. I can trust the process, figure out things as I go and take care of myself enough to give myself a shot at succeeding.
And succeeding doesn’t have to be flashy. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to do with the willingness to show up, to be vulnerable, to take a risk, and to reveal who I am.
Although the workshop was focused on the writing process, I also talked about highly sensitive people, my own journey with the word and introduced the group to Dr. Elaine Aron’s work.
And that’s exactly why I wanted to write a book about being a highly sensitive person.
It was to champion that little girl that I once was and to help shift a little bit of the story about sensitivity. Hopefully, a few decades down the line, less and less sensitive children will grow up feeling that sensitivity is a crack in the fabric of their being and instead have a deep connection with their sensitive soul.
So, all in all, this experience of embracing my feelings of overwhelm was positive. It moved me forward in the direction I want to go. And it showed me that I must embrace more situations and not use getting overstimulated as an excuse for not doing something.
Do you have a blanket rule like this in your own life?
Are there things you have decided not to do because you are a highly sensitive person? Which of these are real needs and which might be a mask for fear?
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the memoir The Empath’s Journey, which combines personal stories from Ritu’s life as a highly sensitive person with practical tools that can help empaths channel their gifts. You will enjoy The Empath’s Journey if you are looking for ways to tune into your intuition, cut through overwhelm caused by noticing too many details, and channel intense emotions through creativity.
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