On sensitivity
My parents exposed me to a great variety of music when I was young, from English and Welsh folk songs to Motown to Joni Mitchell to Pergolesi and beyond. I adored music and took to it like a fish to water, but certain sounds—including, for example, B.B. King singing (‘I don’t like that big voice!’) and the wolf theme from Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf suite—terrified me absolutely.
My earliest memory (I was two) is of hearing the wolf theme and drawing my feet up onto our brown ’80s-era couch in horror (‘Take it off, take it off!’). I could hear that wolf coming to get me; how could everyone else be so calm?
When I looked at picture books and, later, read chapter books, there were certain scary images or words whose appearance would give rise to my slamming the book shut, sweating, heart racing (I am told I even flung an offending library book across the room at one point—I’m sorry, long-ago library book). I might go back and carefully begin reading after the page a given word or picture occurred on, if this could be safely done without the risk of seeing it again. As as child I couldn’t understand, never mind explain, why particular sounds, images, and words were so very frightening to me.
It took me a few decades to come across the idea that being highly sensitive can be a gift rather than a curse in some respects. But throughout my childhood and early adulthood, I simply believed that there was something wrong with me that needed fixing. That I was a little bit crazy, that I just needed to ‘toughen up’. Now I suspect that if I play music or write in a way that manages to touch people, any potential beauty or goodness there must spring partly from the fact that I can’t help but notice and react to small things constantly.
I feel like, by default, my senses are on high alert almost at all times: I will notice that certain way in which the sun is illuminating the trunk of that alder just now, the texture of a crumb on the kitchen floor; what was that weird tingle in my head, am I getting a migraine? the grocery store cashier’s cologne will remind me of a difficult past experience and I’ll feel uneasy for as long as the scent clings to me, or I will hear a bird sing a slightly different interval than that bird normally sings; it’s a little too warm in here and hmm, water tastes different today ... or whatever the case may be, all in quick succession, multiplied daily by thousands of little factors. It can feel overwhelming at times. But sometimes each detail seems to have a significance beyond itself, and sometimes a few of them will stack up vertically in my mind to create a sort of chord; and it is often that harmony from which my poems and music (and joy) come.
I’m glad I can listen to Prokofiev and B.B. King now, and encounter scary images and words, all without panicking. At least, within reason: I still can’t watch horror movies, and I suspect that will always be the case. But I wouldn’t want to lose the intense perception aspect of being very sensitive; and, to me, as long as I make sure to surround and fill myself with support in all possible forms, being ‘too sensitive’ (artistic bonuses included) is worth its challenges.