I think of my sensitivity as both a handicap and a super power. I heard someone say that being highly sensitive isn’t an obstacle or something to overcome. They talked about taking the pain that comes with high sensitivity and turning it into power. That’s alchemy. And while I don’t think high sensitivity is something to be gotten rid of, I do think there is an overcoming that is necessary because with the perks, comes the limitations. Jordan Peterson said it best.
“The fact that you have limitations means that the plot of your life is the overcoming of those limitations.” That’s alchemy.
In the last entry, I said Gene Key #37 wasn’t the only indicator of sensitivity. People who are anywhere on the autism spectrum fall into this category. I suspect that all people with connective tissue disorders belong there too. I think people with significant water sign placements are at least noticeably sensitive if not highly sensitive. I could add Virgo and 12th house placements too. The list could go on and on while we speculate on the degrees of sensitivity. But I think Marvin Gaye summed it up as he sang, Let’s Get It On.
“We’re all just sensitive people.”
When I first became a regular adult psych nurse, in other words, not just geriatric, I realized that I often related more to my psych patients than I did my coworkers. As time went on, I concluded that most of the population, labeled “drug addicts” or “the mentally ill,” were just highly sensitive people. And if my childhood or life circumstances had been just a little bit different, I would have been the psych patient and not the psych nurse. Or maybe I would’ve ended up unhoused on the very streets where I want to serve, the TL of SF.
The Tenderloin of San Francisco is a place filled with highly sensitive people.
These sensitives aren’t lazy and they don’t need to just sober up and go get a job. No, they are tender and they need to be acknowledged and treated as such! If you don’t know what I mean, I would encourage you to watch Mark Latia’s YouTube channel, Soft White Underbelly. You will see a wide array of sensitives. Some are mostly in their struggle and some are mostly in their success. And a few are diagnosed with BPD.
Some think of Borderline Personality Disorder as a sensitivity disorder.
But some associate it with hysteria or even histrionic personality disorder. Marsha Linehan, BPD specialist, best defines the disorder. She says, “People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.” What a picture she painted in only two sentences! Her words partially contributed to my self diagnosis of BPD. Of course, there’s a backstory.
At the crisis line, we had to document the caller’s mental health diagnoses if applicable.
Almost always, I nearly always correctly identified the primary one within the first few minutes of the call. I didn’t ask until it felt like a natural time to weave sterile question into the conversation. Callers wanted someone to first listen. I should pause here to say that I didn’t develop these pattern recognition to that degree until I was maybe a year or so into the job. Anyway, there was one diagnosis that I never guessed correctly and that was BPD. And it wasn’t until after I tried a certain psychedelic that I figured out why.
I was alone when I tried psilocybin for the first time.
I knew a little bit about it beforehand or at least, I thought I did. There was a brief moment or two where the grass was greener and all that jazz. But mostly, I saw the ugliness of myself. I looked down at my arms and they were so old and weathered. Thinking back, the experience reminds me of a sunscreen infomercial I once watched. In it, the women looked into a mirror which, with the aid of technology, reflected back to them their invisible “sun” damage. This was kind of like that but much more awful.
At some point, I got up and went to the bathroom. When I saw myself in the mirror, I was horrified. It wasn’t just my arms that were ugly. Even my face was old and haggard. I was ugly everywhere. Although I didn’t know it then, the spirit of the plant was showing me the distortions of my emotional skin in the only way I could see it, through a physical mirror which reflected back what my third eye saw. Somehow, a domino effect was then triggered and as the days passed, I gradually began to see myself in all of my ugliness.
I had used my sensitivity as an excuse to lash out at those who touched me where my emotional skin had been burned. It was their fault, I thought. They knew better than to touch me there. I couldn’t see that it was my responsibility to start the skin grafting process which is sort of a metaphorical way of saying to start building bridges. Eventually, I also realized the reason I had a blind spot around recognizing that diagnosis in my callers, was because I couldn’t see its traits in me.
I am definitely not recommending psychedelics as a means of therapy for BPD or any other diagnosis.
In fact, I think that if you can’t handle what the drugs are going to show you about yourself, you are better off living in a state of blame and finger pointing. The truth is so incredibly painful that it gives new meaning to the old adage, if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Also, I came to later question the accuracy of my self diagnosis after the TikTok algorithm diagnosed me with autism and showed me a Venn diagram of overlapping symptoms. But I haven’t yet gotten to that part of my story.
P.S. If you haven’t been reading the entries in order, then you won’t know that I am writing about my Chiron wound here in this segment. You can go back to Chiron In Aries, A Wound of Power & Identity. Or, better yet, you can start with the entry before that, Chiron & The Thumbscrew. You can also go back to the beginning.
(edited/completed 5/7/25)