Am I really being an Ostrich?

When my children were really little I rarely listened to the news when they were awake, I felt that it was something that they should not be experiencing.  As they have grown older I started to listen to it occasionally, but more recently I have once again stopped this time because now I really cannot bear to listen.  I am not totally out of touch as Cameron has a daily newspaper subscription, I dip into his newspaper when time allows, reading the news and stories that I want to.

I don't listen to the news any more but I do listen to other programmes on the radio, a month or so ago I heard a talk about sensitive people.  In this wonderful coincidental world we live in, the same week, I found another programme on the exact same subject presented by the same person.  This is label that I had come across before, most usually applied to children, it was not something I have particularly given any thought to.

Sensitivity or being a sensitive person is often implied in society as a weakness and applied to something or someone that is perhaps fragile, easily hurt or upset, too thin skinned.  It is a trait most definitely not encouraged in oneself or others. So what is a sensitive person?  It is about having empathy, listening, picking up clues, being intuitive, noticing the details, picking up on body language.  It is about being able to walk into a room and knowing how everyone in that room is feeling, who is nervous, who has needs not being met, who is confident.  It is about grasping concepts quickly, being good at solving problems often by thinking differently or outside the box.  Each and every one of us have these skills, they are on a spectrum, for some people, those that are highly sensitive, these skills are more acute.

They are skills that are really difficult to measure and we live in a world that measures us.  From the day we start in the education system we are tested.  We have to get the answers right.  We move from education into the world of work where we are often rewarded with pay for our abilities against measures that can be tested.  There is no room in this world for the sensitive people with their skills based on emotions.

I had no idea until I heard this programme that this is a label I can apply to myself, although I have never thought of myself as different,  I was never treated as such.  When I couldn't do my history homework, on torture techniques in the middle ages, because it upset me too much my mother told me not to and sent a letter in to school to support me.  When my grandmother told me that I had an amazing skill of being able to 'read people' it made me feel special not different.

The other week I spent some time sitting and chatting in a group of people whom I don't see that often these days, it was good to see them all again, or so I thought.  Afterwards I felt drained, a sort of brain tired rather than physically tired, I was really puzzled as to why I was feeling like that.  I went out again later in the day and found myself not able to answer questions put to me, I simply couldn't think of what to say, it was as if the part of my brain that could answer such questions had become a mush, incapable of coherent thought, totally unlike me.

It was only the next morning that I realised that those conversations were about things that they couldn't do, weren't doing or wish they could be doing, these are people who focus on the negatives in life.  Now don't get me wrong my life is no bed of roses, there are many things going on in my life right now that are hard work and I would give anything to make them go away but I don't let them dictate how I am, I don't let them shape me, I need the positive to keep the balance.  When we only focus on the negative we get out of balance.  I am sensitive to the emotions of others and whilst I know that I cannot do anything to change their situation I absorb their negativity subconsciously and then I need time to discharge that.  It reminded me that when I was a teenager I never wanted to go to anyones house to hang out after school, I just needed to go home and be by myself.  Unbeknownst to me I was discharging from being at school.

I now don't feel quite so bad that I am not religiously listening to the news.  It is so unbelievably negative at the moment that I am quite sure that many people are choosing to switch off and not listen or watch.  Perhaps you do too?