Today I slept very little. On one hand, we’re experiencing another heatwave – daytime temperatures exceeding 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and on the other hand, deer seem to become more active in the fall – they roam around at night and munch on bushes under our windows. Usually, I don’t hear them, but today the munching deer either had a cold or leaves got stuck in its throat, and it made a strange “coughing” sound. Since my hearing is quite sensitive, that cough woke me up and prevented me from going back to sleep. In the end, I had to turn on an air purifier to create white noise and drown out the coughing. Unfortunately, white noise, while masking individual sounds, doesn’t allow me to sleep comfortably.
You see, I am a highly sensitive person. Being such a person is both challenging and interesting. On one hand, you have heightened sensitivity to almost everything around you, and on the other hand, it can be irritating and exhausting. For example, my need to sleep in silence. Some people can sleep with the radio, TV, podcasts, water sounds, or white noise on, but I can’t. If any of these are on, I know I won’t get proper rest. I’ll keep waking up and end up with a foggy head.
I remember once I stayed in a hotel in Athens, and it turned out the windows couldn’t be opened, and the only way to lower the room’s temperature was to turn on the air conditioner. I did so, but the room was very small, and even though the air conditioner didn’t blow directly on me, it kept moving the air in the room. Despite being tired and really wanting to sleep, that night became torture for me – I never really got any sleep. Maybe that was my first realization of some of my strange heightened sensitivity – to the movement of air in the room.
When I first came across Elaine Aron’s book about highly sensitive people, I didn’t even think it had anything to do with me. But over time, as I became more aware of how I perceive and notice things in my environment and the people around me, I started to think more about this heightened sensitivity. One of the recent “discoveries” was my inability to listen to Robert Kennedy Jr. due to the peculiarities of his voice – it’s almost painful for me.
At the same time, my sensitivity has allowed me to practically “hear” the homes and offices of my clients during my Feng Shui consultations, and now it lets me hear my clients during coaching sessions and be very attentive not only to what they say but also to their emotions, gestures, and exclamations…
