How to Love Someone Who Feels too Much
Lessons from a Peach
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a super-feeler. My own word for someone who feels everything, all the time, to a deep degree. Some readers who could relate shared with me some information about Highly Sensitive People (HSP). It’s basically a term for folks who feel things all the time, maybe more than other people. It might also be bullshit. On one hand, I’ve learned that I can’t really universalize everything I experience. People really are different. On the other hand, I’ve gotten into trouble when I think I’m more special than everyone else. So I’m trying to walk the line between believing that I really do seem to be more sensitive than many, without thinking that I’m particularly afflicted or special.
One thing I do know, is that being with someone like me must be exhausting. I have to work to make sure that I don’t try to bring the people around me on the roller coaster of emotions that I’m riding from morning to night. Not everybody is up for crying at breakfast, giddily swooning over lunch, and then settling into deep melancholy for dinner before a pleasant tear-welling trip through gratitude at bedtime. I don’t blame them. But it’s not like I have a choice. However, I have learned that being this way is not the responsibility of those around me.
That’s a lonely thing. But reeling it in has also allowed me to be in relation with people. To tune into their feelings. To look at them. Feel with them. Celebrate them. For me, feeling lots of things all the time can create a kind of selfishness, or self-centeredness. Because I have always had what feels like an emotional emergency every half hour, I used to tell the people in my life all about it and insist that they understand, often hoping for consolation or identification.
Only crazy people are up for that kind of ride, and, as a result, I’d attract crazy people. But one crazy person is enough in a relationship. My greatest teacher in this has been my wife. She’s such a peach. She’s grounded. Sane. Sweet. And very not crazy. She is an emotional ninja. She effortlessly dodges and ducks my madness, and directs it gently right back to me. I’ve learned how she does it, and I’ve quoted her to friends who have someone like me in their lives who sometimes pull them into an emotional whirlpool.
Our conversations occasionally go like this. Setting: tea just finished. About to shower.
Me: Peach, I was just thinking about the last line in Rilke’s poem about the Archaic Torso of Apollo. You know, “You must change your life.” Like, the lights are still on in this ancient stone, and the God Apollo still speaks through the brokenness of the statue, and the commandment is still powerful, brutally so.
Noriko: OK? Did you return the library books?
Me: No, I’ll do it today. But here’s the thing. It’s not just the statue, right? Like, all matter shaped by human hands still contains the divine, channeled through our fingertips, and it all exhorts us in some way, to change our lives. Street signs tell us to STOP. Sidewalks tell us to walk. Chairs invite us to sit and desks command us to work.
And not just matter touched by humans. Trees are throbbing with life, sucking vitality up from the ground and spreading it over our heads. We just rush past all these things, ignore them, and make our own messages to each other constantly, but underneath it, all is the commandment to love each other, the most primal of all commandments, and it gets drowned out in the noise, but not really, because what if all those signals and messages are, at their core, really just an expression of love? Can you feel it? I can. Even those books I have to return, filled with words, are really just a long way to say, “I love.”
Noriko: Poor darling. I wish I could help you.
And with those words, she goes about her business.
I don’t like to disclose how I am. It’s embarrassing. But I’m doing it so that if you are not like me and have someone in your life who is, you don’t have to go on every ride. Nor do you have to fight it. You can let yourself glide past, elegantly. Feel a spot of compassion. Remind your friend of a task undone. And then, suggest that there’s nothing more for you to do. “I wish I could help you.” It’s nobody’s job to ride the magic carpet of another person’s soul. All we can do is bear witness. Love. And let go.
Feeling you, feeling me,
I am,
Sean Sakamoto
Go Noriko!
I, like you, am an “HSP”* and Randy is my Noriko. (Bless them both a thousand times over for their steady love and patience.) Isaac has some of each of us, but seems to fall a little more on the Randy side of things. He’s quite level headed about most things. The world needs both HSPs and non-HSPs for balance and creativity. I’m grateful for your sensitivity, Sean. It fills and fuels your being which is extraordinary!
*the diagnosis of HSP seems a bit dubious, but the concept is real. I know ‘em when I see ‘em!!