I Was Always Sensitive

A truth I've been holding my whole life...

I was always sensitive

As a child, my mother used to joke about putting me in a plastic bubble
Keep me away from unforeseen allergic reactions
Or at the bare minimum, keep me out of trouble

I was always sensitive 
Saving bugs out of neighborhood swimming pools 
Because “What if they have a family, too?”

And I’m just a kid, but maybe I can help this tiny creature
Bring a smile to its day
Make something feel okay

I was always sensitive 
A brain designed to take things in at an accelerated rate
Combined with a nervous system too easily spent

Biologically designed not to be good at letting go
And a stubborn protective heart
Saying  I’m fine at letting go

“I’m just as good as anyone else!”
Fooling no one but myself

Afraid that if I didn’t hack the contents of my own wiring
My too-muchness would spill over 
End up lying naked in a gutter

With nothing but a half-wilted rose in a bottle
Two holes on the bottom

So no amount of water could get through 
Unable to save the thing already stripped of its own root
A futile pursuit

I was always sensitive
30.5  years of trying to name the unnamable 
An inner world so rich it quietly drowned you

Like being able to see and feel and taste the ocean in its entirety 
And the pain of sometimes wishing you could just be simple

Admire the ocean’s surface and stay above the waves
Enjoy the view without automatically processing its 361 million square kilometers 

And the ache of someone asking why you’re making it such a big thing
It’s just one sunset
“Haven’t you seen a sunset?”

And they’re right
It’s a small thing
But you feel the whole thing

And it’s not your fault 
But you feel like it is

I was always sensitive
Never knowing how to tell someone
No amount of words feels justifiable 

To what I feel on the inside
Never really being good with things that only feel like half-truths 

Praying they hold the contents of my soul with care
Instead, they proclaim 
“All humans feel”

And the palpable gap you’ve felt your entire life
Grows two inches thicker

Has this ever happened to you?
Yeah…
Me too

I was always sensitive 
Trying so hard not to be
Falling victim to the false convictions of a world

Not built for a woman who could dismantle its contradictions with intuition alone
The woman who sees before words need to be spoken
Feel the undertones of an entire room

I was always sensitive
And it pissed off people who benefited from my silence 

To stop trying to find a way to put into words what it means to be human 
To stop finding deeper meanings
To stop a life with one unrelenting goal:

To hold onto hope
When hope feels small

To refuse to stay trapped in a cage 
Even when that refusal means I have to crawl on my knees
A heart battered and bruised by a world that, at times, feels entirely cruel

Arms wide open
I’m out of the cage
But I’m scared

No one talks about how personal freedom doesn’t always feel better at first
How the comfort of your own prison can leave you with a familiar thirst

My therapist said I should try to sit with my younger self
The one who saved bugs from the pool
She turned to me with wide eyes and said
“Maybe this time, we should save ourselves.”

I was always sensitive
But I was also brave
Watched my world fall apart
Remembered I was given the gift of finding beauty in the most silly of things;

A ladybug on a leaf in the middle of winter
Two strangers smiling at each other in the parking lot
Eating a kiwi in the shower
Hot steam rising from my coffee mug
(Writing a poem for the first time in over a year)

They were small things to most people
But they didn’t feel small to me
Because I was always sensitive

Isn’t it funny how noticing small things saved me?
How being sensitive… saved me