To the Moon and Back, paper collage, 2025

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To them… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off… They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating. – Pearl S. Buck

I was just in Italy for two weeks, and my trip home on Thursday was riddled with flight delays. First, a delay in Frankfurt. Then, delay after delay after delay in New York. I ended up getting stuck at JFK airport for eight hours due to weather and didn’t arrive home in Charlotte until 1:00 a.m on Friday. It was 3:00 a.m. before I finally crawled into bed. From the time I departed Rome, it was a 30-hour journey. 

As I was sitting in the gate area at JFK attempting to pass the time with a book (although, I was so tired I’m not certain I comprehended much of what I was reading), a young woman walked up to a row of empty seats, sat down, and proceeded to take a video of herself. She even put on a pair of sunglasses as she talked and gestured at her phone’s screen. “Really?,” I thought. And as I looked at the other passengers around me—every one of them staring intently at their phones—I thought to myself, “Of course. This is the way things are now.”

I’ve talked a lot about sensitivity on this blog over the years, specifically, how I try to manage it and why I consider high sensitivity to be both a blessing and a curse. But one thing I haven’t talked about is the experience highly sensitive people may have of feeling, well, downright alien. To be clear, the feeling I am describing isn’t loneliness. It is beyond loneliness. It is a feeling of foreignness. A feeling that one’s perspective is somehow other, that one is looking in on humanity from somewhere else, almost from another point in time and space. 

We’re the people in your midst who look like you, who walk and talk and, for the most part, act like you, but we often look on you as if we’re looking on another species altogether. We’re the ones who’ve failed to adapt, who’ve failed to be indoctrinated, who’ve failed to adopt what is customary and to accept what is ordinary and who frequently have to remind ourselves that “this is the way things are now” in this world I am part of and simultaneously stand outside of.

We are so in tune with our natural rhythms that we struggle to maintain simple routines, like waking and sleeping at times that don’t agree with us. We have a disdain for small talk and superficial interactions. We struggle in bright, noisy, chaotic environments, and we may even find screen time to be so overstimulating as to be unpleasant. We don’t have a disorder. We don’t need medication. There isn’t anything wrong with us. We’re just sensitive to all the stuff that most people have adapted to—and we are often dumbfounded by the ability of the masses to adapt to just about anything.

We are self-directed and highly imaginative. We crave deep, meaningful interactions. We appreciate art, music, literature, poetry, and nature, and we love meeting other people who we can talk with about these things…because they are becoming increasingly rare. We live slowly and deliberately. The simple pleasures of a cup of tea and a good book are enough to make a day worth living. We’re not trendy. We actually enjoy engaging with our environment in an “analog” way. And we’re not caught up in the endless pursuit of more or better. This, we find to be madness. Indeed, for us, there is madness everywhere. That’s been a fact of life for our entire lives.

In a poem titled, Depart for the Stars, which I published here several months ago, I wrote,

when the madness knocks at your door, my child, 
never forget that your ancestors are butterflies
and the trees are your friends
though in their madness
they’ll tell you otherwise

We are the ones who haven’t forgotten. And that is both a blessing and a curse, as we struggle to preserve to our humanity in a world that seems bent on eroding it from the inside.

my child, when you find madness in the food
and madness in the water
in the preachers and politics and war machines

when the madness screams so loud you can barely take it
remember that comets were made for riding 
that the little bird’s joy is also your joy

you must be brave 
and depart for the stars 
depart for the stars 
as fast as you can