I never realised how hyper-sensitive I was and how other people weren’t until recently.
I suppose it’s because I spent a life-time disconnected from the actual thing that made me tick - my feelings.
I just wanted to be like everyone else and to be all things to all people.
I would have a conversation with someone and get this feeling.
I’d hear the person say one thing and within that moment feeling, hearing and seeing something else followed by hours even days of unpacking what had happened in sometimes a 5 minute conversation.
It would be as simple as -
“Hey Sarah, how is the project that you’re working on?”
“Great, I’m so motivated and am getting it done,” says Sarah with a ‘defeatist tone, with a furrowed brow and in my belly I feel like I want to throw up.
Yes, that is a quick example of what it can be like.
For me, it is rarely about what the person says, and how they say it with their tone, body and even what they’re feeling at the time.
I began to discover that everyone is a contradiction trying not to be, including me.
I am a mystic hoon.
I am a wounded healer.
I am a conformist rebel.
All those things are true too. I must also make other hyper-sensitve people feel uncomfortable too.
That realisation, as I put in onto paper, is hard to swallow.
Yet, it is who I am too.
It’s the hyper-sensitive, contradictive, chaos within my inner world that helps me to create the quilts that I do.
It’s a super-power.
Yet, for my creativity to flourish I needed to really get to know my true authentic self, to be able to articulate it and to be honest about what living like this was like without giving people the strategies to not suffer as I once did and still do. I wanted to write to people and to tell them how not to be the way that I was so that I could convince myself that I could get myself into a state of perfection.
I don’t think there really is such a thing.
So, here I am, talking about how hypersensitivity has impacted my life and the discoveries that I’ve made.
The first thing that I did to get rid of the hyper-sensitivity was to disconnect, which makes complete sense because if I don't acknowledge it, then it will go away.
Instead it set up camp.
Being in disconnect with what I was feeling just made it so that I spent so much time processing it.
I was ok with this for a mighty long time because at least I “looked like everyone else.”
Once the pretence of this wore thin, and I got really, really sick, it was time to find something else to do because ignoring what I was feeling, or burying my emotions (which by the way isn’t possible anyways), wasn’t working.
To be honest, I kept at this same way of living even though I knew that it didn’t work. I wanted to bang my head against that metaphorical wall for so much longer even when I got sicker and sicker.
Through all of this, it was a question that I happened to ask myself after listening to one of Matt Kahn’s sessions.
“What if what I am feeling actually isn’t mine?”
Wow.
What if?
So I began to act like what ever I was feeling was whatever I was picking up on with my environment regardless if I could see it or not.
My life changed.
I’d feel something and ask, “Is this mine?” and 9 times out of 10 it wasn’t.
Any feelings that I am feeling that are not mine, I release from my energy field, return to the source of its origin [sent with blessings for the journey ahead], transmuted completely and healed to completion now.” Matt Kahn
“Had I been internalising other people’s feelings to the point of making myself sick?”
That was another interesting question along the journey and as my health started to improve, there must have been some merit in it.
Getting better meant that I could work on my creativity more and to design my own quilts.
It gave me some breathing space to become vulnerable and authentic to who I was instead of trying to mask it in the hopes of not being barged by all the feelings that I was experiencing.
It gave me some breathing space to create from my soul’s platform and blossom into creations that spoke to me. Lately I am fascinated with creating quilts that are interactive so that people can touch and explore them instead of complying with the ‘do not touch’ signs on the gallery wall.
It gave me the space to be 100% ok with who I am -
I am a quilter.
I am neurodiverse.
I am a highly sensitive person.
I am all of those things and more.
They come and go.
Some change over time and others stay.
Being this way helps me to create from a place that his really deep and unique to me and somehow through the medium of quilting, i’ve been able to show my vulnerable side to the world.
If I can feel what is around me, then what if I could also send into the world whatever I would like the world to feel?
My quilts are imbued with loving, healing and freeing thought and energy.
I quilt because it is also a loving, healing and freeing process for me and what I receive, I give to the world.
I connect with people through fabric art.
I connect with everyone’s innocence at any age.
I connect with the power of intention through material… and it feels so good.
I love that the quilts that I create have a spiritual component to all of them.
That’s some of the good things that can happen by being a hyper-sensitive human like me.
❤️