I am so sick and tired of being called sensitive. My whole life, I’ve been the ‘sensitive’ one in my family. The one who cries the most and ‘feels’ the most. It was a rarity that I could share my feelings without an eye roll, being told I was taking something the wrong way or ultimately, being invalidated.

I’ve always gone through life being told to suppress my feelings. That they were too much or too loud. As an adult, not much has changed. People hide from feelings and emotions. They feel better when feelings are kept to themselves. Adults get uncomfortable when children cry, trying immediately to fix whatever is making them feel that way-silence the emotion. It’s in our nature to not want to address the emotion behind the act of crying.

Why is this? Why do we avoid feelings? Well, digging into them would be messy and would require work. Work that some people just don’t want to do. If you’re a sensitive person, then you know what I mean. You’ve always been the cry baby and it’s everyone else’s opinion that you should get thicker skin.

Typical things a sensitive person hears daily, ‘Get over it,’ ‘Calm down,’ ‘it’s not that big a deal,’ ‘why are you so upset?’ It creates a problem for sensitive people to try to live among others. When every emotion becomes judged, you learn to guard them carefully so as not to be judged by them. Everything you say is wrong and drenched in too much emotion. This is really sad. Sad that I was hiding my emotions to please others. Sad that I wasn’t being myself. Holding on to so much causes pain and illness and in my case, may have caused my cysts.

Somehow as a sensitive person you get attacked for feeling. I think it’s put us in a bit of a predicament. We’ve become an unfeeling society, one afraid to address real issues. That’s left us with a lot of unacknowledged pain and discomfort. When people don’t talk about things, feel things, they begin to fester.

So it’s important for me to voice this as a sensitive person. To voice the need to speak out no matter how other people feel about it. To cry when I want and need to. To feel when I want and need to. It’s also important so that I can break the pattern of attracting people to me that don’t honor my sensitivities and see them as a super power. When I change how I feel about myself, I attract others that feel that way about me as well. Those who judge, make fun of or think my emotions are too much, well, they know where the door is.