Being an HSP Writer

Putting myself out there hasn’t been easy for me. When I started this blog, I was scared of criticism, scared of making mistakes. One of my weaknesses is over-thinking, so I tried to control the future with my mind. 

But after I decided to just do it and see what happens, I have sometimes easily and sometimes, just about hobbled through writing this blog.

As a writer, the constant tension has been between my nature, which is very reserved, and the fact that I write from a very personal space. This tension paralyzed me in the past. What’s different this time is that I realize that I need to hold this tension inside and use it to refine how I express myself in my writing.

As an HSP, I care about how my writing affects the people in my life and their privacy. Every personal experience is not grist for the mill. Before I started this blog, I consciously decided that I wouldn’t write about close family and friends. I have mostly kept to that promise, except that I have written about my husband quite a bit (hopefully in the positive light that he deserves).

One thing that I have learnt from this constant push and pull as well as a few mistakes is that the best test for deciding whether to write about something personal is this: Does it take more courage to write about it or to say it out loud in my own life? Writing is not a space to confront what we should confront personally. And yet, there are certain personal truths that we need to say out loud.

If you are an HSP writer, it is important to learn to discriminate between these two. You won’t find writing pleasurable if you find that it’s creating disharmony in your life. But you will not find it useful if you hold back from saying the truths that give your writing meaning.  

Sometimes, even when these truths involve just us, we often hesitate to say them. For me, hanging in the background is the specter of that age-old Indian refrain: What will people think? When I wrote about washing dishes here at home in America, it felt like a minor risk. Washing dishes is lowly work in India. When I wrote about not wanting to sing the Ganesh aarti (prayer), a prayer that countless Indians know by heart, I felt like I was doing something wrong. Even though I knew that a prayer that says that God can confer the gift of a son (not a daughter) to a so-called “barren” woman is crafted by mere human beings, not God. 

The voices in my head said: “Keep quiet. Be obedient.” Keeping quiet and being good felt like the same thing. Maybe as you write, the voices in your head will scream in a similar way. But if we were to go behind these voices, strip them down, we see that what they are really saying is: Shame on you for airing the skeletons in the closet. We would have liked you better if you had kept quiet.

Yes, they probably would have liked us better. But when we keep quiet and implicitly agree, we start forgetting what we truly believe in. Exercising our voice is about preserving our own integrity, instead of bleeding into someone else’s values.

Once you begin your own journey as an HSP writer, you will find that you have many more such questions and tensions to be resolved. One of my other questions was: “What if I write something today, and then I stop believing it later on?” How could I be consistent? And then, I found my answer in a quote by Mahatma Gandhi in which he says that in his search for the truth, he was free to change his mind anytime. He didn’t aim for consistency in his search. This comforted me. I was asking the wrong question. I could write from my present understanding. I didn’t have to preserve outer appearances.  

This was an important question for me to answer. As HSPs, we become suspended when we feel that we don’t have the right answers. We are loathe to make mistakes, and when we are scared or doubtful, we are likely to freeze. So, whatever questions you have, it is important that you take the time to address them, and move forward knowing that you can find answers to any other questions that may come up in the future. 

I am just at the beginning of my journey. New doubts, new fears keep on coming up. I have to remind myself that what feels overwhelming today will get easier as I learn to tackle it. As sensitive people, we can over-exaggerate the feelings of overwhelm by focusing on our fears. The key is to shift the focus to the present, to just do the next small thing. Gradually, it brings us to a place where we have greater mastery and increased confidence to do bigger things.