MyGiftedLife.org

Never had any physical probs. Well, nothing beyond the annoying labels on clothes.

I curse myself often about how I feel inside about things I see, or read about. Horrible. Am trying to control these feelings, but that doesn't really work.
Sooo, I was the only mom in tears at the school play. (and that was before my own daughter was on stage even). I also cried at the disney parade. There are commercials that make me cry. It's like when moms cry at weddings, but in my case, ...over the top!
Believe me, it's embarrassing at times to get soo emotional.

But there's worse.
I can't stand hearing or seeing any abuse, or injustice. Like when they show the bear saving campaign on national geographic, or clubbing seals, whaling, programs on animal rescue.... and that's just animals.
Some years ago, there was the pedophile scandal discovered in our country. When the news came out that they caught the guy, and the stories on what he did to those children....It made me sick. Literally. I didn't sleep for weeks. I still think about it quite often. Yet it was thé news of the year! Everybody was talking about, and everybody just couldn't stop with bringing up the horrible details.
Or the news when that woman and her kid were to get stoned to death... someone just hàd to fill me in with how that worked. as if i didnt know!
There's plenty examples of things that I just can't handle cause they make me sick, and feel real bad inside.
My "friends" here say that I only want to know the good news, and stick my head in the sand for the bad. That isn't true. I know very well what goes around in this world. More than they do.

And last but not least is NOISE! A sound is a noise..
I can't concentrate when the radio is on. I hear every word said there, and sing along with every song played. Deep concentrating is difficult enough as it is, cause there's always some movement to detect in the corner of your eyes, noises from outside, ...it all registers. "bird singing", "school's out", "church clock", "dog barking"... so when I go back to read the same page again -weeks later even- I automaticly think "bird singing" behind the word that I was reading at the time. Weird. Not heard someone who has this to.
I can't stand loud people. The ones that seem to think that they are funny (but who in his right mind likes those anyway!), and I hate loud screaming kids. (and their parents even more for making them like that).
Machines like power drills or electric saws and lawn mowers drive me crazy.
I don't like going to the movies cause the sound is too loud for me. It hurts really.
And in the building where my office is, they teach music classes on wednesday afternoons: piano, violin, cello, sax, flute.... Guess who takes half a day off than!

Avoiding is all that I can do about it. Avoid noise, avoid joy, and avoid pain. More isolation. Nobody understands.

Did you ever think about using earplugs to mute the noise? The little foamy kinds you stick in your ears are really inexpensive.

I cry at commericials, in church sometimes listening to a sermon, when my formerly selectively mute daughter who would not perform even in school got on stage last June and danced her little heart out.

I'd gently suggest that it's okay to be that way. Your empathy and emotional nature is a gift, not a curse.

Do you write? Sometimes it helps to express your feelings that way and help you process the things you experience, allowing yourself to feel it all. I sometimes have to go completely through the depths of despair, then sleep on it, then I wake up totally refreshed.

Most times, I feel more emotional when I've had insomnia, or an inadequate diet. I need to regulate myself by eating more protein and getting adequate rest and getting in touch with nature.

I have 3 girls, one of whom was EXTREMELY emotional, just like me. No, more so. I was too repressed as a child to give expression to my feelings the way my daughter was able to. Hers was like a huge torrential downpour she was unable to contain. I had to learn, through a process of trial and error, to help her sit with her huge feelings. Also, meditative- like activities helped - ballet and yoga. Bringing the body back in balance through gentle movements really helps to improve emotional self-regulation. Being outside in nature helped too.

I get my news through the internet, and don't read the paper or watch tv because I know she is sensitive to everything just like I was as a kid. I grew up in the 80s and the cold war was in full swing. I was constantly afraid of WWIII.

Interestingly enough, I was in forensic DNA analysis long ago. Some function within my brain allowed me to do the work without getting too emotionally involved in the crime that happened. I think it was the knowledge that I was doing some good for those individuals and families affected. I also worked in medical genetics, where we knew some of the diagnosis was fatal.

Yet, death and dying is constantly on my mind. I've lost a really good friend to cancer, and four others in my life have been diagnosed. It's been rough. I feel awful for those involved in disasters.

Sometimes it's tempting to become a hermit, but then I wouldn't be fulfilling a deep need I have - which is to reach out to others and make a difference to them a little bit at a time. People mean a great deal to me. I mean, certain people do anyway. For certain friends of mine, who really challenge me to think and philosophize with, I attach loads of meaning to people I really care about and places and memories. I dream about the people who meant the most to me. Some I haven't even seen in 15 years. One who died about 7 years ago.

But it's getting harder to find people that really do that do me. As lives get busier, the people I miss don't have the time to even email. Making new friends has been difficult, but I don't give up the search.

I have found a few good people out there in the internet who do seem to appreciate the things I have learned along the way. Those who are writers, or creators, or thinkers, or philosophers. Those are the types of friends that I'm attracted to. My Gifted Life is one of those places I appreciate. I've long wondered what other people felt and thought and if it was anything like I felt. I realized that being smart is fairly common. Sometimes I don't think I'm very bright at all. I do think I am VERY tenacious and VERY curious and VERY emotional and VERY intuitive and I can make some associations between seemingly divergent things. So I feel like I can fit in among the smart ones.


But the smart/ emotionally sensitive/sensual person is fairly rare. Coming to places like MGL and having the fortune to find a few others online brought other people to me that are kind of like me. It's very reassuring to be able understand myself by having others reflect some of the qualities I have. It's very reassuring to have someone let me know that hey...I am not abnormal, just rare. Someone else "gets" it.


However, all that being said...I don't avoid pain (I don't go looking for it either). Joy is a little harder to come by. I embrace the feelings I have. Sometimes yes, the despair is hard to take, and I cry until there is a hard lump in my throat and my eyes get all gritty and threaten to make my ocular rosacea flare up...but I have to let it ride.

I am very noise sensitive too... loud, disruptive noises go through me like a knife in the back of my neck.

Sciencemama i also grew up in the 80s terrified of nukes too.

Death is always with me, but I am ok with it. I'm not religious, at least not at this juncture! I am ok with death and being catapulted back into the swirling, coarsing pulse of matter in the cosmos. I also feel like eating life. I am amazed at my own ability to be amazed. I am amazed that I live. I am amazed to examine this thing called "life" from the inside looking out!! What a p;rivelege! This keeps existential darkness at bay. Most days.

I cry, but not as easily as i once did... I also feel great joy at times over music or moments when I realize something is just totally GOOD... like your daughter's dancing and that will make me cry.
I occasionally avoid news. It constitutes a big time waster sometimes if I "go there"... because I'll start and then may read the entire new york times online.

Smart and emotionally sensitive people may just be hard to spot, because they're trying not to let on how much is felt and therefore it seems to some we are like "spock". I've been told I was "spock-like". at the time I had shut down emotionally toward the person who said it. (My first husband!) when I am free to be myself, and to feel what I feel without shame or scrutiny I am so far from being spock. I am always bubbling and busting and laughing and devastated emotionally inside. But it isn't always showing... maybe it looks like anxiety, or I'm giggly...

When I'm with people who get the real me, it's energizing. But after major changes in my life came about 2 years ago where some judgement calls were made against me, I have all but become a "hermit"....

Now, if/when I'm actually socializing, I can almost physically feel the risk I'm taking, the intuiting or foreshadowing of the idea of this person now seeing "the real me", and that feeling that they may not "get me"...
I'm sure its anxiety is similar to a fear, or paranoia, but without any delusions, just an "emotional speculation" or intuition working to evaluate the risk if you will....

I've been open with people who later stung me, or who "got me" but still belittled because no one else around "did"... and that social sort of game hurts me and has stuck around, has become a maturity I hold.... a sort of "risk assessment" tool that's always been built in, but one I wasn't so aware of before. I'm very sensitive to others acceptance or rejection of my "exposure" if I risk just letting my brainy, enthusiastic side show...


So I just came from sharing a bottle of wine with a friend like that and we could have drank and discussed all kinds of ideas until tomorrow. We've been friends for years, so what made this strange, a sort of misunderstanding 2 years ago made me shut down and stay away from this person all this time... It had very little to do with anything that matters in retrospect, ( she "felt sorry" for my ex husband and thought I should still try to communicate with him, but she just couldn't grasp my circumstances at the time.)

We won't be in touch for a few weeks now because we're both alike and don't really seek out others as a matter of course.
I feel ok about it... and at the end she was turning to leave, she said, I'd forgotten how enjoyable it is to hangout with you"... If she were to want to hang out once a week or more, I'd be like "oh crap". I just don't like feeling like I'm risking anything, and solitude provides shelter.

Makes me think of "I have my books, and my poetry to protect me. I am shielded in my armor. I have no need for friendship, friendship causes pain. I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never dies."
2 points if you recognize that one.

I heard the tune in my head, as soon as I read the first two lines.

I love Simon and Garfunkel!

I think, listening to records when I was 10-11 was one of the MAJOR insulators against my families' hurts. I used to listen to S & G's Bridge Over Troubled Waters. That, to this day is one of my ALL TIME FAVORITE albums.



What a wonderful way to view death! I need to think more like that instead of imagining the decay of the body and where my soul is going to end up (thanks to the old Catholic upbringing).

You are probably right about the hiding smart + sensitive people. I wish I could be better at detecting them.

I can't hide things when I'm upset though. My oldest daughter's first grade teacher is dying of cancer. I ran into another mom when I went out to breakfast today with my husband who told me things are getting worse. We started talking about Mrs. P. and I just started crying (again). The woman, who is related to Mrs. P through marriage, doesn't seem to be sad about it. I mean, I barely know Mrs. P, but it always strikes me as odd that my friend eyes never well up in the slightest. I don't get it. She said she tends to be an optimist about these things, but still...Mrs. P's kidneys are failing, and she just got put on a feeding tube.

We saw Mrs. P over the summer a few times when oldest daughter went to summer science camp where she was. Mrs. P always beamed when she saw oldest daughter and always had good things to say about my girls. I knew back then she was undergoing chemo and it broke my heart then.

I don't know. I think back to those interactions with Mrs. P - how happy and hopeful she always was...and now I just have visions of how things must be for her now. And it breaks my heart to think of her dying and my two younger girls not being able to have her for a teacher. It just sucks.

Anyway...I've never been good about hiding my feelings. Good, bad, angry, sad, happy...I tend to express my emotions to anyone who'll listen.

Well, partly I think it's because my family tried to stamp down on me too much and I refused to let them...nobody could hurt me as much as my family did, so I was always taking risks with my feelings. I tend to intuitively "know" who I can trust and who I can not. Mostly it's been men friends that can do this for me. Not too many women for some reason.

Emotional OEs make us experience things on a deeper level, if it`s pain or if it`s joy, it`s hard to handle it really, but somehow I feel we, the sensitive people can experience things for what they really are more than others so I wouldn`t change with anybody. I do not want the bliss of ignorance. That said,
I can`t watch or listen to the news, it depresses me a lot. Just thinking about how disgusting the world we live in is really hard for me. Not just human evilness but also the fact that there is so much suffering and pain.. it`s really painful to think about these things. But at the same time I really love to be alive and enjoy the beautiful things that do exist in this world and to try to `take advantage` of the bad experiences to learn, and to be inspired to create and to go against the bad with something that is good - in cases that it`s possible.
Noise drives me nuts too, music that is out of tune or ugly, crowds, parties, buses, ugly buildings, strong sunlight, too much bla bla bla, etc..

sciencemama wrote:
[quote]
What a wonderful way to view death!


Ha! I never really thought of it as a *quote* wonderful way to view death! *unquote* That made me giggle for some reason... I dunno...

But in my head, I just have the idea that the passage of time becomes completely irrelevant, and that my consciousness will get another chance, but...

it may not be a consciousness that I can even conceive of now, with my current "sensing" equipment. I won't remember this go-round... but who cares? Why waste energy caring so much about that that we don't even enjoy this trip we're on? It's only desire... a clinging... and our current ego we stand to lose.

To me those are just facts. It's the only way to view it that makes any sense at all to me. It's ALL that "matters". Literally.

And now everyone knows Laurie's a head case And I'm so glad for it too. Believe me I'm NOT usually walking around feeling enlightened... I'm shooting for that when I'm old and more wise. ?
*?

You are probably right about the hiding smart + sensitive people. I wish I could be better at detecting them.


This is where I've gone sort of "out to lunch" for the past 2 years because of the burns I've suffered. It was a very dark time for me, and I'm just coming out of it all now... starting to interact with the world and people again...I've learned a hell of a lot...
We reveal our own selves, our heart on our sleeve... and poof! Authenticity magically appears out of no where...
I enjoy the company of people if they're highly authentic, curious about life and the world, and simply not judgemental. These people are more common than the high IQ crowd, so we must find the good in them to keep ourselves in good company...

but people are multifaceted and what I find is, I, ME, MY presence brings out a side to people that they can not maintain... and I am let down... Almost anyone can have a "side" they may show you that is highly authentic. I make people feel safe being themselves this way... even those with a tremendous amount of depth will spend most of their time in the shallow waters. It is safe there. Certain people (mostly family) call me when they need someone to "be with them" while they're in deep waters due to life circumstances... the rest of the time? I'm often made out to be a bit of a joke to them. Nice, huh? I know the score, as do they...

My closest truest friends? I have maybe 3, and I consider myself extremely fortunate... but my whole life I"ve been farming and checking for depth of consciousness, of conscience in others, quite literally, (Friends of whom I've asked the meta-questions... and by virtue of our acknowledging one another in this way, we each recognize the RISK and magnitude of real kinship as well... and gratitude expressed is so important to risk) and carefully get close to others who're sensitive like myself, and all this over a period of time. Most everyone who knows me knows full well I"m not "like everyone else", and I bring out something in them when they are with me and they are authentic. The people I call my closest friends are those I can continue to risk with. They are "like me"... that same authentic person with everyone all the time too, or are, like me, deeply disturbed by being in the midst of INAuthenticity...

I once thought a "church" experience should provide a venue for our deepest selves with folks, but upon close examination, it's social support where people are guided or shown how to present their authenticity "properly" as it is patterned around some construct not usually FELT...( let alone felt deeply) This is just silly... "Here's how to be authentic!!" Antithetical.

I believe for this reason that church communities are far more agnostic than the agnostics!!!! Gnostics were surgically removed from the canons because they claimed we can find it in ourselves NOT doled out by some robed dude with the special knowledge. People MUST begin to reclaim religious history and find true spiritual benefit in their life... A desire for authenticity leads them into these "arranged" facsimiles. The spirit, we are told, is found in the church congregation in the context of that church in the context of a denomination, and so on...I want to see more people off of religion and catching on to their soul, so I live the change I want to see!! ((That's so cliche now! I hate that it is!)

Health means feeling strong enough to risk ourselves at something. The magic lens to see others with is the heart. What else is our health and heart good for but to step up and take risks in life. This is health we stand to gain as we age... which for me somewhat softens the blow of the wrinkles and first signs of gray!!!!
The only context in which the spirit is found is US! Hallelujah.
Let's be our authentic selves and watch it spread!!!!
Not that we can't still shop for shoes!! Just do it more joyfully while focused on grand schemes and deep feelings and intricacies of our experience of existence?


Oy, I go a ramblin today! Because it's literally thrilling to have OE's.