There’s Nothing Wrong With Being Sensitive

In the recent hooplah about political correctness and trigger warnings, a phrase that gets bandied about far too often is the claim that people are just “overly sensitive” these days. This is often met with (generally quite reasonable) assertions that outrage over racism, sexism, and other everyday cruelties is not simply being extremely sensitive but rather actively asserting boundaries. The problem with this approach is that it accepts the premise that being sensitive is bad.

Sure, there are downsides to being sensitive. It can make everyday life more difficult, and you might have to spend more time calming yourself if something stressful or unexpected happens. And yes, sometimes being overly sensitive can mean that you become anxious or upset over something that isn’t truly doing you any harm. But these things are true of just about anyone: sometimes we all make the wrong call about whether something warrants a strong reaction or not. That’s a human tendency that we can actually cultivate skills to overcome.

But there’s a difference between “reacting inappropriately” and being sensitive. One is a behavior and the other is simply a fact about how your emotions work. There are lots of people who don’t have a choice about being extremely sensitive. As someone with borderline personality disorder traits, I’m one of those people. I react quickly and strongly to things.

For some people, this would be a reason to discount the times when I react, to discount my arguments and my issues with others. But simply because I have strong emotions doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of thinking through issues and figuring out whether there is a logical and rational basis to my reaction. Indeed, including some of the strong emotion in my response also doesn’t discount it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being sensitive.

Sometimes I cry over absolutely nothing. Usually I tell the person with me that I know it’s nothing and ask them to sit with me through it. That’s not a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with having that strong reaction. And there are also positives to the extreme sensitivity. I’m pretty good at picking up on the emotions of others, which makes me far more likely to check in with someone and find out what they’re feeling. I also get really strong happy feelings when something good happens. And I’m also pretty in tune with the times that people violate my boundaries or do things that aren’t acceptable. That means I’m more likely to be able to let someone know when I need them to do something differently. That might look like me being a pansy, but in reality it’s extremely healthy and a skill that everyone probably needs to learn to one extent or another.

Sensitivity really just refers to how strong our emotions are. There’s never anything inherently wrong with feeling something. As I’ve mentioned before, the place that we have to be careful and responsible is in choosing how we should act because of our emotions. If the best you can come up with is that people these days feel too much, then you’re really grasping at straws for why they’re wrong. What should be up for argumentation are not people’s feelings, but rather their arguments and requests. If those don’t have logic or go too far and put too much burden on others, then it seems reasonable to argue against them. But when someone else gets upset over something you wouldn’t get upset over that doesn’t make them worse than you. It doesn’t even make them pitiable. In fact in some ways it makes them better at things, and in other ways it makes them worse at things.

There’s no need to promote the idea that you “allow” yourself to be hurt if you’re sensitive. There’s no need to idealize being cold and unflappable. Having emotions is totally acceptable and does not make one irrational. Even strong emotions can be good or neutral things. I refuse to be insulted when someone calls me sensitive. Yes, I am thank you very much. That is utterly irrelevant to my arguments.

What It’s Like: Major Depressive Disorder

Hello and welcome to the final installment of the What It’s Like series! Previous posts 1, 2, 3, and 4. Today I’ll be trying to talk about the most amorphous of my diagnoses, Major Depressive Disorder. Once again, the disclaimer that these are my experiences. I am not a mental health professional, I don’t speak for all people with depression, and depression can look vastly different for different people. If you know someone who has depression and want to know what it’s like for them or how to help, I strongly suggest talking to them.

Onwards, to depression!

I cry a lot. I mean a lot a lot. I cry more than any other human being I’ve ever met. Sometimes out of absolutely nowhere a wall of just straight out pain hits me and my eyes get all watery and even if I hate it I can’t stop myself from crying. Depression is like having enough sad/bad/scared/aaah feelings that they start leaking out of your face at random times.

I can always tell when my brain is falling into depression or anxiety based on my sleep patterns. Anxiety means insomnia, which in turn comes with day after exhaustion. Depression means just being tired all the time, sleeping for 12 or 13 hours at a time, never feeling rested, never having energy. It’s the times when it’s sheer struggle just to stay awake through the day and my eyes start going out of focus every few minutes. Depression is down, anxiety is up.

Depression for me also tends to be whole world focused. Anxiety usually revolves around me and how horrible I am and what I’ve done wrong. It’s all the nasty little voices at the back of your head that tear you down. Depression is more along the lines of despairing hopelessness. I’m pretty far into nihilist territory in terms of my philosophical beliefs, and it’s also easy for me to fall into solipsism. These are the kinds of things that will trigger a deep depression for me. There’s a lot of evidence that the world is fairly purposeless, that most of our lives will be spent doing basically the same things, and that if you’re not satisfied with that you’re going to be miserable. Those are the sorts of thoughts that are quick to send me into a depressive spiral.

So what does it actually look like when I’m depressed? I get quiet. The whole world starts to feel overwhelming, too loud, too big, too bright. Basic tasks feel insurmountable, possibly because I just don’t care. Things feel heavy or thick, and it takes too much effort to remember or focus or smile. I feel tender and broken, and I curl into myself, physically and emotionally, to try to keep myself safe. My appetite goes wonky: sometimes I feel empty inside and just want to eat all the time, sometimes food sounds terrifying. More often than not depression is a feeling of having no idea what your emotions and your body are going to do next (but a strong conviction that it won’t be good).

The thing that I dislike the most about depression is anhedonia. I get anhedonia like nobody’s business. For those who don’t know, anhedonia is a loss of interest or enjoyment of things that used to be fun or engaging. I’m typically someone who enjoys a lot of things. I’m a joiner, and most of the time I’m trying new hobbies or filling every second of every day with things that make my brain feel engaged. So when those things stop holding any interest, it impacts me in a big way. I’ll try to go do something fun to pull up my mood, but it will feel pointless and joyless, which pushes my mood down even further. There is nothing that will make me smile, never ever ever again, everything will always feel like a struggle, and I’ve become utterly broken because the things that used to be awesome aren’t anymore.

It’s really easy for my brain to turn everything into the worst thing in the world when I’m in a down period. Something goes wrong and I’m inconsolable for days. It’s not a plea for attention or an attempt at drama. My feelings just won’t turn off, they won’t stop hurting. It feels like someone’s ripping my throat out through my stomach. I’ll cry so hard my whole body starts spasming. I feel it in my body. I get aches and pains, I can’t make it through a work out. I get sick.

And I get mean. When I’m depressed the whole world revolves around me. I want to make some allowances to myself and others for the fact that you get to be a little self absorbed when everything hurts, but it’s true that I ask for a lot and can’t give much back when I’m down. Being alone feels impossible because my brain won’t stop telling me bad things, but I don’t know how to do anything but complain since my brain also won’t let me see anything interesting or happy. So I end up compulsively texting and chatting, going on and on about how much I hate myself and my life and the world. I can see myself doing it and I can’t stop myself. It hurts to feel so dependent.

Depression for me also tends to come in long, ridiculous bouts. The worst was probably during my sophomore year of college, fall semester. I spent the entire semester so hopeless, lonely, and bored that I had to talk myself through each hour, promise myself that I could get to the next one. I spent a lot of time trying to numb myself to everything through starvation, mindless games, or any form of escapism I could use. Most seconds were spent wondering why I was still alive, what it was doing for me or for anyone, why it had to hurt so much. Sometimes it felt like nothing and sometimes it felt like everything packed into me all at once.

It’s hard to make any sense of depression or put it into a neat narrative. That’s probably why this description seems so disjointed: depression doesn’t make sense. It’s a lot of really unpleasant feelings and horrible thoughts mashed together in no discernible order. It’s assuming the worst, losing the good, and feeling like no one cares. And unfortunately, since my depression is chronic, it’s always lurking, waiting for a bad day that it can take advantage of.

What It’s Like: EDNOS

This is the third in a series. Find the first two posts here and here.

This is the point in the series where things are going to get a little hazy. The remaining diagnoses that I have (EDNOS, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder) are all big buckets. They cover a lot of people, they look a lot of different ways, and it’s entirely possible that other people with these diagnoses will have nothing in common with my experience of them. So while I did offer a disclaimer on the first post, I want to reiterate in a BIG WAY that this is just my experience and I don’t speak for everyone. There’s also the possibility that these three get mixed together in a big way, so I’ll be doing my best to separate the strands of what’s what’s but I make no promises that there will be clear distinctions between things.

With all the disclaimers out of the way, let’s get on with it.

EDNOS or eating disorder not otherwise specified is kind of a catch all diagnosis for people who have disordered and unhealthy relationships with food but who don’t fit clearly into one of the other diagnoses (anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder).

I have a very restrictive type of eating disorder. I’ve never had binge eating as one of my symptoms, and I exclusively restricted my food intake for about four years before I developed purging as a symptom while I was in treatment (this is fairly common). I likely would have been diagnosed with anorexia if my weight was low enough, but it never quite dropped that far. When it started, it was mostly focused on feeling lost and confused around food (I had been a competitive swimmer for six years and when I quit I wasn’t entirely certain how to eat anymore) before devolving into a desire to lose weight.

Since then it’s become a very different beast. Control has always been an important part of not eating for me. It makes me feel powerful and more than human to go days without food. It gives me the conviction that I am actually capable of anything if I try hard enough, as I have done things the human body probably shouldn’t be able to do.

My eating disorder is how I manage a lot of my anxiety, perfectionism, and OCPD tendencies. One of the main things that I associate with it is a distraction from whatever is actually bothering me, and a way to make it seem like I have some control over my life when things are stressful. I’ve always been more focused on myself as intellectual, rational person than as an embodied person, and so things that remind me of my body can be stressful.

I’ve often felt as if I would be better, more in control, and more powerful if I just didn’t have a body. Not eating is a useful way to ignore the facts of my mortality and embodiedness. But I also can’t stop thinking about them. For years, I could tell people exactly what I had eaten for the last week, at what times, and approximately the calorie counts of each thing. I tend to get a god complex when I haven’t eaten in a long while because my body feels floaty and empty in a way that makes me feel invincible.

I also associate fasting with morality. There’s something saintly about being ascetic in my mind, and I can’t quite shake the connection. I’ve always been fascinated with religion and being “good”, and self-denial is a big part of how society (and particularly Catholics) define morality and godliness. Every time I don’t eat, I feel like I’m being good. I feel guilty when I do eat, regardless of what it is or how much. This has toned down over time, but there have absolutely been times during which I would spend hours trying to determine when it was acceptable for me to eat, how much, what kind of food, etc.

I feel like a failure when I eat too much. Not a failure at a diet or at losing weight, but a failure at being a human being. Sometimes it reduces me to crying in the fetal position because I’m convinced that I’m the actual worst person alive. This can extend to other activities around food. I get anxious about grocery shopping because I can only imagine having ALL THAT FOOD in my house that needs to be eaten RIGHT NOW (don’t even get me started on perishables).

And somewhere under all of it is the conviction that being skinny will make up for all my other deficits. I may not be able to play piano as well as that person, but I sure as hell am skinnier than them and that makes me better. It’s a very competitive mindset that doesn’t look at me alone but looks to other bodies to define acceptable. This might go back to my inability to find a grounded identity without feedback from others. Of course my view of myself is distorted in comparison to others, and I don’t actually care how big other people are as long as I am THE SKINNIEST.

There’s also a fear of letting myself go. If I let myself eat this thing, what’s to stop me from eating everything else in the whole world and bloating up into some sort of horrific parody of a human body? Again, I don’t find other people who are large disgusting, but I have a hard time grounding my worth in anything but my body.

I do find my own body disgusting though. I spend a lot of time trying not to look in mirrors because when I do I will sit and pick at every tiny flaw. I do this in other parts of my life too, but my body is so obvious and immediate that it’s easier to focus on it instead of the flaws I think I have as a person. Worse, when I am aware of those flaws I try to punish myself for it by not eating. I don’t believe that I deserve food or space or confidence. If I give myself even a little bit of those things, I’ll probably go overboard and become a narcissistic asshole. No food means that I’m keeping myself humble.

I also tend to fall apart when I don’t have structure in my life. Food rules became a way to organize my life. For a long time the rule was never eat two days in a row, and while I’ve managed to adjust that rule quite a bit, I still have a very hard time eating before noon. It’s just not what I do (or so I tell myself). I also find some safety in dictating how I eat: I don’t have safe foods, but I hate meals that are composed of more than one thing. This is why I tend to just put all the stuff I want in one pot and mix it up so that it’s like only eating one thing.

Probably the final important element of EDNOS for me is that I have an overactive brain and not eating/focusing on food are both ways to keep myself from getting bored and stressed. My mind processes things quickly. It doesn’t always do this well (I make a lot of sloppy mistakes), but it’s constantly going and going fast. Sometimes this means that I get stuck on a thought if there’s nothing else there to replace it. This would probably play into the OCPD tendencies I have as well as my anxiety disorder and my EDNOS. Where I would often in the past be turning over and over something that had embarrassed me, something I was worried about getting done, my eating disorder allowed me to change that to constant thoughts about food.

There’s a lot more to the experience of having an eating disorder, but the strongest feelings are self-hatred, guilt, and desperation to be good. These get expressed in a lot of ways, but they dominated my experience of EDNOS.

What It’s Like: OCPD

This is the second post in a series. Find the first here.

HUGE DISCLAIMER: I am not formally diagnosed with OCPD. There are absolutely some problems and pitfalls with self diagnosis, but in this case I identify strongly enough with the diagnosis that I feel comfortable talking about it. At the very least, the label serves to collect a variety of my symptoms in an understandable fashion. Many of these symptoms don’t quite get picked up by any of my other diagnoses, which is why I’m taking this space to talk about them.

OCPD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. This is not the same as OCD, which involves recurrent, intrusive thoughts that can only be dismissed with a compulsive behavior. OCPD is a personality disorder with a high focus on perfection, achievement, and control.

Sometimes my brain gets stuck. It’s almost always on something that I am stressed about, something that needs to get done. Most mornings I wake up with a blank slate that I need to fill with accomplishments in order to feel that I’ve earned my right to be alive for the day. Most days I can manage it reasonably, but sometimes I get caught. I’ll spend hours rewriting the same to do list in greater and greater detail, specifying exact time frames for each task and rearranging the order to make sure it’s just perfect because otherwise there’s no way I’ll get it all done, and thus no way for me to be ok.

Schedules, lists, and plans are the only things that feel truly safe to me, the only things that put the world into some semblance of order so that I can be in control. This means that when plans change suddenly (when someone cancels at the last minute, when someone suggests plans at the last minute, when I simply have to adjust what I was thinking I would do) I get incredibly anxious. Even if the new plan suits me better than the old one, I’ll still resist it because it’s just not the way things were supposed to be.

I often can’t enjoy fun or relaxing activities because my brain will continue to run the script of what I should be doing or what I could be doing that would be more productive. When I was younger, this often manifested in being kept awake for hours at a time stressing out over what I needed to do the next day and trying to figure out how I’d have the time to do it, only to be left exhausted and unable to do most of the things that needed to get done.

I’m also a huge rule follower. I like things to have an order to them. Even when rules are pointless or annoying, I still love to follow them because it feels safe and it makes sense. This often comes with a moral tinge to it: in high school, I would get irrationally angry at my boyfriend for walking on the grass instead of the sidewalk or at other students who slept during class because they weren’t doing what they were supposed to. Mostly this gets aimed at myself in unreasonably high expectations and a need to prove that I am good by doing everything just perfectly. I am terrified of making mistakes and catastrophize whenever I do.

On the more mundane side of the spectrum, I’m extremely stubborn and can be highly inflexible (this is what I decided to do, so I’m flipping going to do it and if you don’t like it I don’t like you), and I have a lot of anxiety about money, to the point that it took me until last year to realize that I could spend money on things simply because I wanted them. Despite having a hefty savings, I was still convinced that there would be some unknown disaster in the future and that I couldn’t spend my money on good things now without dooming myself to an unknown destruction in the future.

I just like to know that I get to control what I’m doing and when I’m going to do it, because I have an irrational worry that I’m never going to be doing enough. I always feel as if I should be working harder, longer, and better. I’m afraid of authority, because authority has the power to take away that control. My thoughts about all of this are constantly intrusive, leading to bizarre paranoid fantasies that I will get fired for no reason or that getting a single B on a test will lead to living on the streets. While at a normal extent these tendencies make sense and are often encouraged, at the level that I have them they interfere with my sleep, with relaxation, with relationships. They make me cranky and difficult to be around. They make me controlling and hypersensitive to change.

There are ways to mitigate it, by questioning things that feel clearly like facts, and by organizing my life in such a way that there are clear distinctions between work and play. I also get to exercise my compulsiveness by organizing things. Alphabetizing books is like heaven to me (in grade school I would stay in from recess to shelve books in the library because it was more fun).

Does anyone else have experience with OCPD? It’s not a very common disorder and I’d love to hear other experiences.

Monday Morose Miscellany

It’s 11:59. There’s a ringing in her ear. Ring in the new year as they say. Or is it a new day? They’re close enough anyway, and when the minute turns over it will be an ending and she needs that ending like she needs the ringing to drown out the endless voices and start again in silence. It’s silent now, late at night, home alone. She vaguely wonders if she remembered to lock the door, but it’s loud inside, hammering painfully against her skull, making her squirm and look at the clock for the numbers to turn. To end.

 

 

 

Drums.

Arouse a building nausea.

They lost themselves in mind’s recesses and won’t stop echoing.

Sleep

It’s a dream that filters behind the eyes

Celebrated with fireworks, red and gold.

Blink

But not too much or your eyes will get stuck

And you’ll be lost inside your eyelids forever

Empty

Is a wish

For an empty mind and empty body

Filled only with drums.

 

 

 

 

Delicate white branch

Laced with the snowfall of night

Vanished in the sun

 

 

 

She begins with herself, always. In the present tense and first person, she is always the crystal to focus the light of her own mind. A turning inwards, a breath. Who am I today? She wondered, echoing the calls of a thousand young children across the globe. Why today? Came the teenage call, yearning for purpose. When can I rest? She asked, as she suddenly felt her body grow old. She begins with herself but herself is a multitude and she cannot end until she has touched them all. Her crystal has grown diffuse. She cannot see in the gloom.

 

 

 

I’m sitting in a cube

Always in cubes

Open air is foreign, and so I pack my

Spaces into boxes

Filled with boxes

To pretend I take up space.

The boxes are sharp, all straight lines and corners

So I went myself into curves

And ooze into empty places

Hoping the edges don’t cut

I don’t fill the boxes

I can’t feel the boxes alone

It’s easier to pretend I’m not here at all.