Surviving Life as a Highly Sensitive Woman
Surviving Life as a Highly Sensitive Woman
when you also have a shaky sense of self and a few mental disorders...
Disclaimer: Hi, Darling! We’re talking mental health in this, so if it’s too heavy a topic for you today I understand! Read at your leisure. This is also a longer post, so please do read it in your browser or the Substack app.
Have you ever heard of Borderline Personality Disorder?
How about Bipolar?
Schizophrenia?
Depression with suicidal ideation?
Let’s get super vulnerable — in addition to myself, I have family members that deal with each of the aforementioned diagnoses. So when I tell you I come from an emotional family, I mean the full gambit. Thankfully, we’re a tight-knit family, and we love each other very much. We just so happen to also be very well versed in emotional upheaval.
Living with these diagnoses and growing up around people with these diagnoses can, will, and absolutely does drastically alter your life. My wonderful, beautiful life of fashion, writing, traveling, and working in luxury media is also filled with manic episodes, breakdowns, dissociation periods, violence, hopelessness, self-harm, etc.
And while ‘feminine energy’ and ‘feminine rage’ has been a huge talking point lately, most of it excludes the very real reality of living with mental health diagnosis like bipolar, borderline, schizophrenia, etc.
So let’s talk about it.
I won’t talk about every single diagnosis, because while the effects of some of my loved one’s mental diagnosis has impacted my life, those are also their stories to tell.
What I can tell you is my own story.
I can tell you how being a woman who deals with depression, suicidal ideation, borderline, and HSP (woah, writing that out seems like a lot, doesn’t it?), not only impacts my daily life but also how I take back control when my emotions threaten me {like they have these last few weeks}.
I am a Black woman, and in our community we prioritize strength, endurance, work ethic, and resilience. But what happens if you aren’t very strong? Or resilient? What if, like me, you’re a woman who is highly sensitive and often overwhelmed by the world and the requirements of living? Grab some coffee, let’s talk.
Raising A Highly Sensitive Daughter
My mother told me that when she became pregnant with my older sister, the first thing she thought was that she did not want to raise a girl the world would consume. Same when she had me. She didn’t want life to beat us down in the way that, as we get older we unfortunately understand, life has a tendency to do. So she raised us to take control of ourselves and our lives. She made sure we always knew our own power, and that we navigated life not out of fear, but out of faith.
But, it was difficult.
Both my sister and I had mental struggles that made her already difficult task harder. My sister dealt with it by exploding outward. I dealt with it by shrinking and turning everything inward.
My poor mother, life for her was a game of ping pong. Just when one daughter is back on solid ground, the other would have an episode and she’d go back and forth between us helping us hold on to sanity.
I know she’s lived most of her life in fear that one of her children would kill themselves, and there are times I feel a tremendous amount of guilt for it. It’s honestly one of the reasons I’m hesitant on having children. I know what it’s like to grow up in household where suicide lingers over the house like a haunting. But, more than anything I am so thankful for her as a mother. When I say she’s done a parent’s job of keeping their child alive, I mean it in every single sense of the word.
What is a Highly Sensitive Person?
Being a sensitive woman is a beautiful gift. But, yes. It doesn’t make some things a lot tougher. I am a textbook HSP. Now, HSP (Highly-sensitive-person) isn’t a disorder, it’s more so something that impacts your personality. You can read more about the symptoms here.
When I tell people HSP is part of my personality, typically they laugh and brush it off. ‘That’s not a real thing,’ they’ll say, ‘you’re just sensitive.’ Once, a man I was dating told me, “I’ve never met a woman who cries as much as you.” He didn’t say it in a mean way, he was just really surprised/in awe of it lol. But I do let people know because it’s a more extreme version of being sensitive that can shock/frustrate people. Here’s what it looks like for me:
The world can be too much for me that I regularly become paralyzed and shut down. This probably happens 3-5 times a week. That includes staying home and isolating myself from the world. It can mean going somewhere, and suddenly becoming so overwhelmed I park and stay in one spot for 6+ hours. Once in a nightclub I became so overwhelmed I froze on the spot and wouldn’t move from that exact spot on the dance floor for hours (much to my then boyfriend and security’s dismay and irritation). It’s almost like a robot losing its charge. Wherever I am when it happens, I just stop moving. I’ve gotten better at working through it, but it used to really frustrate and freak people out.
I am very sensitive to sounds. A door closing can cause a flood of tears. A child screaming can cause a fit of anger. A loud sneeze can send me into a panic attack.
I have very strong physical and emotional reactions to violence whether real or perceived (i.e. movies, music, video games, etc). I once made a date turn off Breaking Bad (his favorite show) because the violence sent me into a panic attack and tears.
I get my feelings hurt deeply from simple things that aren’t personal.
I have issues dwelling.
It can take me years to process and move on from something.
I am highly attuned to the emotions and moods of others and I am very highly impacted by even the slightest change in someone’s mood/behavior.
I am highly attuned to and greatly impacted by my environment. If the lighting suddenly changes I can start crying. If there’s a shift in sound I will burst into a fit of anger.
In short, I get overwhelmed, overstimulated, and stressed very frequently to the point it influences what I get done on a daily basis. It makes it hard to run errands, and do simple tasks because I am so highly impacted by my environment. Don’t worry, I share more about how I cope down below.
Random sidenote: This is one of the reasons I hate Trader Joes because it’s so damn overstimulating. I lose my mind, and I will cry.
Living With Dissociation, Depression, and Borderline Personality Disorder (But You’re always so Happy?!)
I have a strong sense of self. Except, when I don’t. Enter the trio of borderline, depression, and dissociating.
I’ve had depression since childhood, so at 31 it’s become something I've learned how to manage. I don’t want to downplay it, but my therapist and I have worked so extensively over the decades with it I’ve gotten to a point I feel more in control of it than it is of me. Borderline and dissociation, however, are newer. And, quite honestly, I’m still learning how to manage life alongside.
Dissociation is probably the worst. From my experience, there is a distinct difference between checking out and dissociating. When I check out, usually I’m still here, I’ve just checked out of the demands of life, numbed myself a bit, and kind of am running on auto-pilot. When I dissociate, I’m not here. It’s third-party. I see myself from a third-party, and I can’t get back ‘inside’ to connect with my body that’s moving around separate from me. Everything becomes deeply painful. It impacts work, and especially relationships.
I dissociate often. Because of disassociating, my sense of self slips away, and I become lost. It can be very difficult to find myself again. I have to fight for who I am. Even when I don’t know her.
They say dissociation is a huge part of borderline. I’m starting therapy soon for borderline, so I’ll keep you updated if you’re interested.
How I Manage Life as a Highly Sensitive Woman
I consider myself a pretty spirited woman with a beautiful life. But, life does knock me down. A lot. And I can take a very long time to get up. That’s just the truth. I don’t always get a lot done in a day. It can take me weeks to accomplish 1 task that takes others a mere hour. I lose my sense of self frequently, and I become so lost in life I don’t know which way is up. Depressive and dissociative episodes take me out for months at a time. But such is life. It doesn’t mean I can’t have a great life, because I do. It just means I’ve got to build a toolkit for this shit. So here’s my toolkit.
Therapy: When I was young I remember my therapist saying, you will probably always need to have a therapist in your back pocket for the rest of your life. I’ve been in therapy since middle school. CBT therapy has been really great for depression. DBT is better for borderline. I’m not currently on medication, but I have in different seasons of life. Some seasons it worked wonders, some seasons not so much.
Living Near Support: I need people to help keep me alive. Let’s not sugarcoat it. I suffer from things that trigger suicidal ideation. So yes, it’s just a reality that I will need to be physically near people who I love and who I trust to help me in those moments. For me, that includes people like my therapist and my family.
Controlling my Environment: As much as possible, I control my environment to placate my high sensitivity. I tend to keep my environment completely silent. In the evenings, I’ll do soft music sometimes. I control scents. I control lighting. I control clutter. I control fabrics and textures. I control my routines to help minimize paralysis as much as possible. That includes only going to select stores, restaurants, etc. (even if they are out of the way) to prevent triggers. I control my social media engagement to protect my sensitivity.
Exercise: Whatever I feel I need mentally or spiritually, it has helped me to also focus on it physically. If I feel I need to mentally endure something, I’ll work on my physical endurance through cardio. If I feel like I’m lost or overwhelmed, I work on grounding and meditation through yoga. Some of my mental issues can make me feel out of control of my body, and connecting the mental to the physical helps me regain that feeling of control over my body.
Writing: It helps me give voice to emotion. It helps me process how I feel and untangle the paralysis. When I’m dissociated, it can help me find my way back to myself. A lot of the time it’s how I ask for help, and how I help those who love me understand what’s going on internally.
Faith & Religion: I need both. Full stop. I need Christ. I need His grace, His love, His mercy, His protection, and His hand over my life. I need to be at His feet. And I need to be in service to Him. I need to do the work of trying to keep His commands, of seeking His word, of being in obedience and of service.
I have a loved one who has bi-polar, and the amount of times she’s just wandered into a random church during manic episodes and had random pastors sit with her and pray over her and call forth God’s hand over her until she is out of the episode is numerous. So much so, it warms my heart. My family has gone through a lot of turmoil, and Christ and the church have walked with us and seen us through so much.
Honesty About my Condition: I don’t hide it. I’m not ashamed/embarrassed about it. It just is. I guess because I grew up around all this stuff, and my mother never ‘othered’ us for our conditions I didn’t view it as something to hide. It was just part of life. I’ve never known life without being around these things, so to me it is normal. Plus, in order to know me, in order to love me, and in order to understand me, this is part of it.
Lastly, grace and compassion. I’ve found that other people are more accepting of my mental diagnosis than I can be to myself. I can be very ambitious, and it’s frustrating when my body/mind/emotions can’t keep up with the demand I place on myself to achieve. I‘ve had to learn to accept that my emotions cause me to move a lot slower sometimes. It makes it harder to pivot and bounce back from changes and setbacks.
Sometimes I so deeply wish I could be the powerful woman who is tough, resourceful, quick on her feet, and aggressively ambitious. But, I’m just not that woman.
It doesn’t mean I’m not strong. It just means my strength and achievements come in different ways. I’ve had to learn (and am constantly learning) to find peace in that. I’m going to get to where I’m going, it just may take me a lot more years and a whole lot more tears to do it lol!
xo, Zauni Tanil
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