Highly Sensitive

The smoke has cleared and Deborah is happy to discover that some of the behavioural characteristics she shares with her children can be categorised

It was many little things, combined, that made me feel different. I was too fragile, too dramatic, too much. I was physically timid, hated sport, fearful, but also emotionally excessive. I found a lot of dayto-day life – things other people seemed to find easy – overwhelming. I could not bear school camps, injustice, suffering. And being different made me feel like a misfit. I developed a persistent feeling of being not good enough – that I was somehow disgusting, ugly, stupid and flawed. My internal monologue: Nothing I do is good enough, there is something fundamentally wrong with me, I am bad and toxic.

Feeling unseen and misunderstood, I was “mirror hungry”, looking for explanations for the way I am and how to fix myself, to become more normal. Why was I like this? I didn’t know.

In my twenties and thirties I coped by learning to lose myself in working long hours, and when I wasn’t working, to drink a lot, as an escape. But when I had children, I couldn’t do that any more. My defences crumbled, then it turned out, our children were odd-bods too. They were highly aware of and easily affected by their surroundings and painfully empathetic. They developed to their own timetable. Others saw this as immaturity. But whereas I was harshly judgmental of my own so-called weirdness and rabid in trying to stamp it out, I couldn’t feel the same about their quirks... I loved them, despite them being ‘different’, and began to accept myself too. (Thanks, kids!) Mainstream schools might not understand them, but I saw their vulnerability as creative, unique, a gift. But I struggled to find an explanation for what we were exactly and where we might fit.