The day I found out I was a "Highly Sensitive Person"

All my life, I've been a pretty emotional person... very much a "heart on my sleeve" kinda gal. In some ways, this improved as I got older, and in others it got "worse". (I say that in quotations because I've come to believe it's not really a bad thing; I just have to learn to manage it differently.) I've always hated crowds, busy places with lots of noise, any type of chaos. I don't like feeling pressured. It always blows my mind when I hear people say that they LIKE working in a high-pressure, high expectations kind of job, because it sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. I don't like feeling like my performance is being observed or critiqued in any way. And once I had a toddler, I discovered that I'm really sensitive to sudden loud noises, or repetition of loud noises.

I felt like a terrible mom before I found out that this was a legitimate "thing". I would sometimes be almost in tears when Rowan would use a toy hammer, and I felt awful asking him to play quietly. I felt like noise was just an inherent part of boyhood (and it is), and I felt like I was robbing him of a childhood somehow by not being able to cope with excess noise. And then one of my friends shared this article on Facebook.


I was ELATED. Seriously, it was like a huge weight had just been lifted off my shoulders. I wasn't a mean mom who just didn't want her sweet little boy to be a normal boy. I had a name for the things that I thought were just freakish quirks that I'd carried with me most of my life. I quickly went and took the test (which you can find here, if you're interested) and checked off 24 out of 27 questions. So many things finally made sense, like how other people's moods affect me so deeply I have trouble distinguishing whether the feelings I'm feeling are MY feelings, or I'm just absorbing some of their emotions. Ok. Cool. So... what now?

That's the hard part. I found a few articles about how to parent if you're a HSP, and a lot of them said things about bringing nature into your home. (Fresh flowers, potted plants, pet fish, etc.) So I did. I no longer feel bad asking Rowan to tone it down a little, although I try to save it for when I'm feeling truly overwhelmed. He's a sweet kid and really does a great job of accommodating his weirdo mommy. ;) I've also enlisted DH to help shoulder the burden, and boy has he come through like you wouldn't believe. Have I mentioned before that he's superhumanly incredible? Because he is. He's doing an awesome job of making sure I get a little downtime if I need it. But it's still HARD some days. There are times I just go to my closet and cry like a child for a few minutes because I just feel completely inadequate to the task at hand. The noise, the chaos, the toys everywhere, the crying child who wants to snuggle at the same time that the other crying child wants to be nursed... I still really struggle a lot of the time. But I'm coping, and I know I'm not the only person who deals with this now, and that's made an enormous difference.

Are any of you Highly Sensitive and raising littles? How do you deal with the hustle and bustle of daily life?