My Sensitivity is My Strength
When I grant myself permission to transport myself back into moments where I stared shame in its face, I realize that the most common thread - the underpinning of the hurling pain associated with shame - is the notion that I am “too sensitive.” Moments where I crumbled at my father’s seemingly innocuous tone, or the lunch periods in high school where I displayed all of my available tears for all my peers in the cafeteria because I couldn’t grip the overwhelming emotions I had absorbed, or the times where I intuitively understood my environment to be unsafe but had no logical reason to have reached such conclusions thereby ruling my sensitivity as irrational and therefore untrustworthy. I consistently felt less than and somewhere along the line, I believed that to be true.
Beneath every insult that others had thrown my way with such powerful force to actually land somewhere meaningful existed an inherent belief that I occupy space on the extreme ends of the spectrum: too much and not enough.
I distinctly recall dozens of moments off the top of my head - or more appropriately, from the depths of my body - where I rolled my eyes, grunted something awful, or felt my breath snag on something within in response to the proclamation, “Your greatest gift lies within your deepest adversity.” Sometimes I felt empowered by quotes that sung harmonies to “People who pull you down do so because you are already above them.” Other times, I had internalized damaging external beliefs so heavily that I felt such massive burdens atop my chest that I lost my breath somewhere in the wreckage.
It has taken over six figures of student loan debt, countless hours of therapy, an embarrassing number of wine bottles and other mind-altering substances, and enough tears to replace our planet’s water tenfold for me to finally understand what a piece of me, albeit ever so small, has known and understood all along: all of these adages are 100% truth…
My sensitivity is my greatest strength.
The same sensitivity that I wished away on many stars and clock strikes of 11:11 is exactly the birth place of my consciousness. This location bestows information upon me as if I am the most abundant queen with worlds upon worlds at my fingertips. This sensitivity is my home. A home and boundless sense of comfort that so many others - people that I had held so close to my chest because I wanted so badly to believe that they were capable of feeling to such depths as I was and could thereby reciprocate the very emotions I could tap into with every fibre of my being - had condemned me of, in every sense of the word. This sensitivity is the core of my strength: unbridled, irreparable, and indisputable evidence of my inherent truth.
My ability to enter a shared space with another human being and immediately feel their current state forges an incredibly beautiful pathway to love and understanding. My ability to detect even the slightest nuance in another’s behavior or essence, my ability to tap into energy shifts on other planes, is the source of the greatest discoveries of universal truth. My ability to embody stillness within, connect to a force so much larger than could be consciously understood in this third dimension of ours, and create an expression of such depths with reckless abandon is an ultimate gift: a gift for which I had allowed myself to be shamed; a cross I had not asked to bear and had cursed whatever power had bestowed it upon me; a tool with which I attempted to silence myself for many agonizing years.
Within this gift and within this strength lies the realization that I can’t forgive the aforementioned others until I can fully and powerfully step into the realm of self-compassion. Wrapped in the warmth of gratitude and a sense of connection from the space above my head through the vortex of my abdomen to the tips of my toes, I am so incredibly in awe of my own gifts. I am so appreciative of all aspects of myself, spanning from the part of me who sometimes rules with an iron fist in the name of self-preservation, to the part of me who holds ultimate rulership and has granted permission for all of me to step into this space of whole-hearted forgiveness. With this full mind-body-spirit integration, I feel these words in my bones: Brandi, I forgive you for all the ways in which you learned to survive, and I empower you to disrobe from your armor and step into your power. This gift grants you the power to not only heal yourself but to also shed the light from your path to others so that they may use your footsteps as markers for their own journeys. You are powerful. You are limitless. You are loved because you are love, and I love you.
Keep healing - you are illuminating more truth than you know.