Birthing Our Stories

In her wonderfully honest A Broom of One's Own, writer Nancy Peacock talks about the importance of containment for giving birth to the stories inside us. Frittering away our energy in talking about them before our stories are ripe to share almost guarantees that they won’t see the light of day.

Peacock says: “Stories want to be born, but they aren’t attached to the form that they take. A story is just as content to be told orally as it is to be written. If I go around telling it to everyone, it’s happy and gone. The tension is over. Talking about a work in progress to anyone but the most carefully chosen people is a death knell.”

I think this goes for any creative work – using up energy in discussing the work before there is anything solid to discuss – stalls the creative process and runs us aground.

What do you think? Is there any creative project that suffered because you shared it too soon? 

Grounding and the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)

In his wonderful website HSP NOTES, Peter talks articulately about what it means to be an HSP or a highly sensitive person. He talks about how life always seemed louder than him and the world “bigger, louder, more violent.” That’s probably the experience of everyone who identifies themselves as being HSP.

When I think of myself as a sensitive child, what I remember first is going to a crowded neighbourhood market in New Delhi, India – the kind of market that sits next to sets of DDA flats – with shops where you could buy groceries, with a tailor, and a stationery store plus a halwai or a sweet-seller. If you walked a little further down from these concrete shops, an entire road was taken over in the evenings by vegetable and fruit-sellers with their carts, the din of people haggling, pushing and shoving and jostling for space.

And somewhere between these two, a row of beggars – old men and women huddled under their blankets in the cold, hazy evenings. I remember coming back home and hiding to cry – there was so much suffering in the world, so much pain. And just by going out, looking at these poor people, I had absorbed it. There was nothing I could do about it.

So, a trip to the market when I was 7 or 8 became not something to look forward to, but something to avoid, something to get away from. It hurt too much.

That was one of my early experiences of my own sensitivity and my distress with it. It was a double-edged sword – this ability to feel others’ feelings. I valued my sensitivity as the best part of me. At the same time, it felt too vulnerable. I did my best to deny, minimize and distance myself from it. 

Avoidance became a strategy, so did numbing out. What I did not have early on and I think, what most HSPs don’t have, is the awareness of what our trait actually means. Of course, we know we are sensitive – we can’t help knowing that. But we don’t usually know in the beginning how to anchor ourselves or structure our lives around our own nature.

For a lot of us, this process of integration unfolds gradually as we discover the different pieces of the puzzle of who we are. For me, grounding has been a struggle. I’ve even struggled with the definition of the word – different people define it differently. But the definition that has been most useful to me as a sensitive person and an empath is in relation to electrics. Just like a wire is connected to a point deep in the earth so that excess energy will be discharged, grounding is essential for empaths to let go of the excess, harmful build-up of energy.

This can be done by getting back to the basics. Regular exercise – something as simple as walking – grounds us. It moves out the excess energy that has us spinning around like a top. It helps us flow clear again. Being aware of how to let go of excess also helps us move from avoidance to engagement. Knowing that we have a center to fall back on is reassuring beyond measure.  

What missing pieces of the HSP puzzle have you discovered? What do you still struggle with? 

About being sensitive, food, and horror movies

A new place is an open space for making discoveries. For me, one of those discoveries has been realizing that the things I like are very different from the things that I “think” I like.

Take food, for example. As an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person), I am very sensitive to tastes. Synthetic ingredients in food really bother me. 


I can immediately tell while eating outside if something is sub-standard. But although I am tuned in to these nuances, I am realizing that food, in itself, is not a big source of pleasure for me.

Don’t get me wrong – I love chocolate as much as the other person. But the times that I really enjoy going out to eat is when it’s part of an experience like when there is great live music. As an HSP, I deeply value beauty, and so, the aesthetics of the place – how harmonious or imaginative it is – add to the pleasure.

What doesn’t give me pleasure is discussing fine food – the tastes, the textures. I definitely don’t enjoy watching most cooking shows. I think that has something to do with being an HSP – we need simplicity and an over-abundance of things – images, possibilities – can be over-stimulating. So, I like to cook, but like to try new recipes once in a while, and not too many one after the other.

Maybe the greatest pleasure is slowly eating simple, yet delicious food. Recently, an old post by Gretchen Rubin (who I suspect is an HSP) jumped out at me. She talks about how she can only wish that she enjoyed fine food here.

Another thing that I’ve changed my mind about lately are horror movies. I had always thought that I wouldn’t be bothered by them (although I had seen very few). But I find them very enervating. HSPs are easily startled, so it stands to reason that we would be very alarmed by what goes on in a horror movie. I found a kindred spirit in Kelly who writes about this here.

What about you? Are there any things you thought made you happy? And they don’t?

15-20% of the population are HSPs. If you are wondering whether you are an HSP, you can take Elaine Aron’s self-test here.