Sensitivity and frustration
I’ve been sensitive as long as I can remember. As a little kid I’d notice how others are, and as a result became hesitant in letting others truly see me.
The world and those in my little corner of it were something to observe, frequently letting the noise happen around me whilst I stayed on the outskirts.
If you’re anything like me, being sensitive can be tough. You notice what others don’t see. Minor things feel major to you. Major things can be overwhelming.
To be sensitive is to feel, to acknowledge, to have a radar exposed to the world taking in the radio waves that are always carried in the atmosphere.
Having that antenna out means picking up on all sorts of signals, both positive and negative, and often leads to over analysing what we’ve picked up, trying to understand it from every which way.
Frustration comes about like this.
To be frustrated is to have sensed something. Something external, maybe; something internal, for sure. Sometimes consciously, other times under the surface.
We notice something outside of us that points to something inside of us and we dislike what we find. We wish it were different, better, fixed, simpler, more us shaped.
But the world isn’t us shaped. It’s you shaped. Them shaped. Everyone else doing their thing shaped. And that can be frustrating.
Frustrating because things aren’t exactly how we’d want them to be. The world wasn’t designed to the spec of our inner monologues. The world doesn’t fit neatly into our prebuilt box, no matter how much we try to jam it in.
One solution is to stop looking. To pretend that the world has in fact fit inside our box and that everything is fine. Nothing to see here, move along. We’re fine.
But to the sensitive this falls short. We notice things whether we like it or not, and we’ve noticed this. Something isn’t quite right and we wish it was. We wish it were better, easier, simpler. And this frustrates us.
Frustration then, is a by-product of seeing. Pent up; it can cause great harm, eating away at our souls from the inside out, until it finally reaches the surface and reveals a hollowed out mess where we used to be.
But if seen, then felt, then processed, then communicated, it can be a force that reshapes our world, internally first, then externally too.
Nothing great happens without someone sensing, becoming frustrated with what is and doing something to change what will be.
So if you, like me, have a delicate radar pointing out at the world partnered up with an overthinking captain at the helm, remember that frustration isn’t inherently bad.
Without noticing the things that need fixing, nothing would ever be made whole.
And sometimes in the noticing we’ll realise it was us that needed to be made whole, after all.