Creativity & the Highly Sensitive Person: What Makes Us Tick?
Why is it that the very traits that people envy in some of us HSPs are the same ones they denigrate?
Take creativity, for example. If I’ve heard, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body. You’re so lucky!” once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. Yet there is always an underlying (or perhaps overlying?) sense that what the person is actually saying is, “I would be nice to draw or sing or play an instrument, but all the sensitivities that go along with all that stuff? Faggedaboudit. Not worth it.”
I suppose certain kinds of creativity and sensitivity are inevitably linked, and I suspect that stories about alcoholic, drug-addicted, ear-cutting-off artists and musicians and writers have infused our societal and cultural belief systems around such individuals. At the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a few days ago, as I gazed upon Van Gogh’s irises, it struck me, as it always does, that genius is so often inextricably tied to pain, distress, and self-destruction. It also struck me, as it always does, that it often doesn’t need to be that way.
Where would the world be without music or art? Even more to the point, where would the world be without love? Where would the world be if the high sensitives were revered for their complex, often misunderstood, approach to life? What if, instead of being told to “buck up” and “get it together,” we were offered support through the thoughtful interpretation of our “shyness” or our “weakness” or our “neediness”?
In 2020 in a “Talks at Google,” Alane Freund, LMFT, says, “Highly Sensitive People often think before they act. Even the kindergartner who shows up to school the very first day will stop in the doorway and look around the classroom. ‘What’s over there? Who’s playing over there? Hmm, I smell something. Is there cooking? Am I going to cook?’ … Compared to the kindergartner who just runs in and starts playing with the trucks right away. The teacher might assume that kindergartner who hesitates is shy. But what if the parent says, ‘No, he’s not shy. He just likes to get the lay of the land first.’”
What do you think that child would take from such an interaction?
Labels don’t help
To be labeled “shy” can stigmatize our capabilities and abilities for life, while being labeled “thoughtful” versus “impulsive” or “confident” can help us feel valued for what we bring to the table.
When I think back to the way both my children cried and cried and cried, the way their sleep patterns were constantly changing, and the way their reactions seemed over the top to sound and taste and touch, I wish I’d known then what I know now. Sensory overstimulation is one of the most challenging aspects of being an HSP—if the people around you are attempting to push you, a round peg, into the square hole that is the rest of the world.
Next time someone you know is “confused,” suggest they stop and question what was happening in that moment be
fore their apparent lapse. For me, confusion is simply an indicator that my IGS is kicking in—that my Intuitive Guidance System is pointing me in a direction and I’m not paying attention. It may feel like confusion and look like confusion, but sometimes what looks like a duck and acts like a duck is not really a duck at all.
We can call creativity “sensitivity,” but how about switching our thinking from the assumption that creativity and sensitivity are tied once and forever to some inherent kind of weakness?
For the sake of you, me, and the world.
