I was doing some spring cleaning and came across a photo album that I brought from India (where I grew up) to my home here in the United States. And this was one of the photos in it.
I am the kid in the bottom-row, sitting down, with her hand on her head.
I think it was on “fancy dress day” at school (We wore a uniform on normal days). Some of the other kids are more dressed-up for some reason I don’t quite remember.
Or a reason I didn’t even know then. I was usually in my dreamworld as a child.
Just as the sun seems too bright for me here, there seemed a paper-thin membrane between me and the rest-of-the-world.
And things that didn’t seem to bother other people affected me deeply, colored me deeply.
At that time, while I was called “sensitive,” it wasn’t known that sensitivity is an inherent trait.
And like a lot of people, I just muddled my way through this “too intense, too much” experience. At different times, I felt intensely or numbed out, disassociated or pretended, sometimes disappeared and in moments of grace, connected and became more of myself.
During really tough times, I grew thick scales that guarded my sensitivity. There was a dragon at the gate, a crocodile swimming in the moat.
Not everyone was invited into the inner sanctum.
Sometimes, when I think of my experiences, I wonder which parts of my sensitivity got protected because I was a girl.
Growing up in a patriarchal world, I know which parts got slaughtered.
AND I also know that I got to keep some parts of my authentic self intact because, at least, you don’t have to kill your feelings off entirely when you are a girl.
I wonder sometimes about the sensitive men out there.
I remember a man who circled back to my table to get my book at an author’s fair. He talked to me very briefly, and as I explained what the book was about, he said something about how he had to cut that part of him entirely.
It was a fleeting, the briefest-of-brief interactions, but his palpable despair stood out to me.
Afterwards, I chided myself because I couldn’t find the right words to say to him. I was in an oversmiling, too-positive-state.
But I have thought of him afterwards. And I have thought of some other men I’ve encountered, sometimes in professional or personal situations and sometimes just fleetingly out in the world.
And I wonder what all happens to a little boy who is told to swallow his feelings or who is very different from the norm.
There’s a part of me that feels so sad for that little boy, just as I did for the little girl I once was, who felt like the outsider, looking in.
And I hope, we, as best as we can (because self-compassion can be difficult), reach out to the little one who lives inside us and hold them with the love that might be missing in the world outside.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey. Find more about Ritu HERE.
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