The Surprising Truth of Being a Highly Sensitive Person in an Insensitive World

I have lived most of my life believing I am an emotionally sensitive person. It felt like a constant battle to feel seen or heard. My subconscious mission was to ensure other people knew just how emotionally sensitive I was, so that they could adjust their behaviour accordingly and tread lightly.

I did not realise it at the time, but it took a lot of consistent energy and effort to solidify and reinforce that identity out in the world. I believed that my emotions needed to be validated by the people that surrounded me.

I built an entire identity around my emotional sensitivity.

In return, the world kept showing me and reflecting back to me how sensitive I really was. Some people saw this as a problem that I needed to work on, while others could relate and stood behind me bolstering and egging me on to fight the resistance.

Everywhere I looked, my identity as a highly sensitive person was present. It was the lens that I perceived the world through, and it was the lens through which the world perceived me. It was very much a two-way street. My world, and everyone in it, played their part beautifully to keep my identity in place. They worked tirelessly to keep me from becoming aware of the truth:

I am not an emotional person.

The truth was that I had learned to identify with my emotions. At a young age, I had learned to identify as my emotions, as the emotional turmoil that was my daily experience. At times, I felt like I was emotionally stunted because I couldn’t “control” my emotions like everyone else seemed to do. Then I would swing to the belief that I was emotionally superior because I had not allowed myself to become hardened and emotionless to life’s ebbs and flows.

Either way, the focus was consciously and unconsciously on my belief that I am a highly sensitive person. In my mind, the world seemed to be an insensitive, combative place that was trying to make me hard. It seemed to always be trying to shut down my emotions.

In essence, I took that as the world trying to shut me down. And I did not like it. I had to fight. I had to resist. In my mind, I had to stop myself from becoming just another insensitive person in an insensitive world.

All of that resistance was coming from inside me. It was building and building like an active volcano, and was always just one trigger away from erupting. The trigger would happen. I would erupt. And then I would settle again and become dormant until something shifted within me again, and it would start building all over again. Sometimes happening several times in one day. It was exhausting. As tumultuous as it was, this was my daily life experience.

And then I awakened.

After my awakening experience and walking the path for some time, I started to recognise that my entire identity as an emotional being was not real. It was not my true self, nor did it in any way reflect the real me. That emotional version of me was in fact just one aspect of the larger patterned self, the ego “I”. My true self did not react and respond in highly emotionally charged ways.

For the first time, I felt emotionally stable and at peace. I could recognise that nothing which happened in my external world or in my history was a reflection of the real me, and it did not have any effect on my internal experience. Inside, I experienced harmony and stillness. It was an entirely new experience that once I got a taste for, became my entire life focus.

The realisation that I was, in fact, not an emotional being, but rather, pure consciousness, shifted my whole experience of not just myself, but also of reality. I went from seeing reality as a harsh, insensitive place, to a place of experience and exploration. Reality is not out to get me, because there is no “me” for it to get. I am not under constant threat. Life supports whatever experience I choose to have.

For many years, life supported my choice to live as an emotionally sensitive being. Now, I just get to be, and life supports that too. In truth, I am not an emotionally sensitive person. Rather, I am awareness. I am everything in the experience of this moment. I have no edges, boundaries or limitations.

And now I get to be free.  

In the wake of that freedom, the freedom from identity, I feel more connected to the people I love. My concern was that if I stopped identifying as a sensitive person, I would have no way to connect with the people around me. In reality, I have freed them from having to tip toe around my triggers and continually play along with my imagined self. There is space for a real, authentic connection.

One of the biggest surprises has been how easily and naturally I can connect with my loved ones when I stop trying to shape the connection according to my perceived worldview and skewed self-image. As much as I can bring my true self into my relationships, it opens space for those I love to show up.

I no longer need to try make myself feel seen or heard, because my real self is always present, and my emotional experience is just that, an emotional experience. It no longer defines me. There is no definition that could fully encapsulate the experience of self and reality that is happening now. Words just cannot do it justice.

Identifying as an emotional person was my greatest source of pain. Letting it go has been my greatest experience of liberation. Moksha.