Читать книгу The Highly Sensitive Person - Elaine N. Aron - Страница 46

Now I will try my own hand at this new literary genre of infant diary, with the experience of an imaginary, highly sensitive infant, Jesse.

The wind has been blowing incessantly, sometimes gusting into a howling gale, sometimes falling to an edgy, exhausting moan. For a seeming eternity clouds have swirled in random patterns of blinding light and glowering dark. Now an ominous dusk is descending, and for a moment the wind seems to ebb with the light.

But the darkness is disorienting in itself, and the howling wind begins to shift directions indecisively, as it might in the region of tornadoes. Indeed, out of this rising chaos the veerings do take a shape, gaining energy from one another, until a cyclonic fury emerges. A hellish hurricane is happening in deepest night.

There is some place or time where this awfulness stops, but there is no way to find that haven, for this weather has neither up nor down, east nor west—only round and round toward the fearful center.

I imagined the above happening after Jesse had gone with his mother and two older sisters to the shopping mall, riding in his car seat, then a stroller, then back home in the car seat.’ It was a Saturday, and the mall was jammed. On the way home his two sisters had a fight about which radio station to listen to, each of them turning the volume louder. There was considerable traffic, many stops and starts. They returned home late, long after Jesse’s usual nap time. When offered a chance to nurse, he only cried and fussed, too overwhelmed to attend to his vaguer sense of hunger. So his mother tried putting him down to sleep. That is when the hurricane finally hit.

We should not forget that Jesse was hungry, too. Hunger is yet another stimulus, from inside. Besides arousing one further, it produces a diminution of the biochemical substances necessary for the usual, calmer functioning of the nervous system. My research indicates that hunger has an especially strong effect on HSPs. As one put it, “Sometimes when I’m tired it’s like I regress to this age where I can almost hear myself saying, ‘I must have my milk and cookies, right now.’” Yet once overaroused, we may not even notice hunger. Taking good care of a highly sensitive body is like taking care of an infant.