Many of us who are highly sensitive also have the trait of high-sensation-seeking, which can feel really paradoxical at times. On the one hand, as sensitives, we are cautious. We don’t like unnecessary risks. We don’t like making mistakes.
And we have a deep-seated need to understand things and not rush into them headfirst.
Then, on the other hand is our high-sensation-seeking side, which is decidedly a bird of a different feather.
We tend to get bored easily. We love variety and novelty. And we also have a need to experience things – really taste them firsthand.
If you’re someone like this, someone like me, you might feel like you’re a walking mass of contradictions. Your highly sensitive side is a little risk-averse, yet sometimes, you can take really big risks and even huge leaps.
This can make you feel as if you have two people inside, and they don’t quite get along. And sometimes, it can feel as if one of them is stepping on the brakes and the other is hitting the accelerator, all at the same time.
I have written about this dynamic that sensitives who are also high- sensation- seekers face before here.
When this push and pull happens, we can feel stalled, stuck, and frozen. The two sides of us are literally pulling us in different directions.
This tension between high sensitivity & high-sensation-seeking can feel like an unsolvable problem. That is, until we start noticing that both these sides have valuable things to teach us.
For us, creativity comes not from valuing one side over the other, but from holding the tension of these opposites inside us.
Let’s say you are a fiction writer. You love that feeling you get when you write without knowing exactly where you are going. It feels like an adrenaline rush. It feels exciting, kind of like a new love affair. This discovery, the unspooling of the story in front of you and the surprises it offers is what you chase in your writing.
This is your high-sensation-seeking self in action, the part of you that loves variety, that seeks new experiences, and that loves to turn stones over and find hidden treasures underneath.
Once you have followed the flights of your story and written it down, then, your highly sensitive self kicks in. You care enough to double-check the facts so the plot feels realistic, at the same time making sure there are no grammatical errors.
You look at what you have created with an attention to details.
Both sides of you – the sensitive, receptive part and the exploratory, adventurous part – come together to create something beautiful.
And both these parts are essential in your life as a sensitive, creative person.
They are intertwined, a bit like the Yin Yang symbol, each half containing a little bit of the opposite.
The reason we sometimes stall as sensitive creatives is because the exploratory, mess-making part of us has not been encouraged or even admitted. Many of us grow up in families or cultures where “looking right” meant doing things a certain way.
So, we have never quite had the practice of letting our exploratory side try things out, which is a mess-making process in itself. We have never had a chance to see that this “mess” is, in fact, prima materia, the raw material out of which we can create the gold of our work – our stories, our paintings, our musical compositions.
And we also haven’t had a chance to experience that IF this messy, adventurous exploration does end up leading to a dead-end, then that, in turn, tells us something useful. We have learnt one specific way how not to do something.
We have, in fact, made an experiment.
But because we don’t do these experiments, we also don’t get to see that messes are easy to clean up.
It doesn’t take that much to begin again, to set aside words that don’t work, to paint over a canvas, to park an idea in a folder marked Miscellaneous, to begin walking again in a completely different direction.
The next time you’re wondering whether something is a risk or when your sensitive, cautious, conscientious self is misguidedly trying to keep you safe & trying to prevent you from hearing the toxic, wounding whiplashes in your head (What’s the point of writing a poem? What’s the point of painting a collage when the world burns?), ask yourself: “Is this really a risk? Or is this an experiment?”
How will you know UNTIL you write it or paint it or dance it whether what you’re doing will make a difference or not?
Have you not read words that breathed new inspiration in you? Or seen something so cathartic that you were pulled from the brink of a depression?
None of us changes the world on our own. And yet, what we make changes things just a little bit in a real way.
Teaching ourselves this difference between what feels like a risk but is an experiment and what is a detrimental risk is a way to parent the creative child inside us, the child who is still learning to walk, who is still learning to figure out what’s real, and who is still learning to differentiate between true facts and mere opinions.
I hope you encourage this creative youngling – this curious one who might be getting short-changed because of the tussle between your two sides, and notice that the tussle is not just inside your paradoxical, infuriating self, but also because these two sides have gotten contaminated by noises from the outside world.
It’s time to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s time to clean up the mud.
It’s time to do more experiments.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person & emotional empath.” SIGN UP HERE for Ritu’s newsletter The Highly Sensitive Creative or Get the book HERE.
Leave a Reply