I don’t remember being told I was sensitive as a child. That came later, mostly in relationships. Earlier than that, I think I learned something different. I learned to be quiet. To observe instead of react.
The house I grew up in was often tense. Conversations carried weight, unpredictability, and sometimes conflict…
My brother was always the vocal one, even though he was younger than me. He filled the space easily. I didn’t. And because I didn’t, I think my needs went unnoticed more often than not. Not because they weren’t there, but because I wasn’t expressing them the same way.
The only thing I remember being told about myself, especially as a teenager, was that I was bossy. Controlling. Words that didn’t feel accurate, but stuck anyway. Looking back, I don’t think I was trying to control anything. I think I was trying to manage something I didn’t understand yet.
It didn’t look like overwhelm, at least not in a way anyone would have recognized. I wasn’t shutting down. I was adapting. Still paying attention. Still trying to keep things steady. But underneath that, there was a constant buildup. Too much information, too many signals. More than I knew how to process all at once. And because it had always been there, I didn’t recognize it as overload. I thought it was just me. My reactions. My personality. My fault.
It took a long time to understand that it wasn’t sensitivity. It was volume.
I still notice everything. That hasn’t changed. What’s different now is that I understand it. I don’t question it the same way, or try to push it down as quickly. I’ve learned to recognize when it’s too much, and to step back before it builds into something I can’t manage. It doesn’t make me difficult or too much. It just means I process more than I realized.
And once I understood that, I stopped trying to fix it. I just started learning how to live with it.