Ode to the Sensitive Body
Sensory-Emotional Brain Style Gifts
What does it mean to be human? I recommend taking a moment to listen to this song by the lovely Hayden Calnin. Interrupt the rush — I dare you.
Glorious. Now we can begin.
Humaning: verb. hu-man-ing. (ˈhyü-mən-ing)
1. A word coined during the neurodivergent awakening of the 21st century to capture the ironically alien feeling most beings have when existing in modern society.
I am just over here humaning.
He doesn’t human very well.
Can we human together?
In fragile bodies lit up with a billion nerve cells on a rock floating through space, far from the primal clutches of our ancestor molten lava pools, desperately more complex than chlorophyl drenched sprouts pushing through soil, our lives are architectures of sensitivity.
Here, in physical bodies, we learned to turn our tendrils toward the sun, to root in the soil for the stench of starches, to move in families, soundwaves breaking upon our ears for signals of safety and belonging.
All of life is sensory.
Seen the Barbie movie? Check out this scene where Barbie explores becoming human. It’s entirely and gorgeously sensory. Trees, sunlight, laughter like tinkling bells, the splash of water — we live deeply in our senses. In Buddhist psychology, the senses or “sense gates” are how we encounter reality. They wake us up to the present moment. Here! they call. Breathe, feel, live!
Sensory sensitivity is a birthright. It is a location of deep belonging on our planet.
Now, let’s get down and dirty (cue amber and jasmine hues of fertile soil smell).
To be born with a highly sensitive nervous system is a wonder — sensitivity of the gods, some might say. Beyond normal.
Your belonging on this planet might look like melting in the pleasure of wind or becoming a whirling dervish in the glow of neon lights. Your pulse may quicken to the turn of a crisp book page. The grind of a pencil in an old-fashioned pencil sharpener may give you superior satisfaction.
Also, your skin might feel like it is falling off when you touch cold water. A color might feel like bees in your brain. You might wretch at the sound of a word.
Sensitivity, both its torment and its trill, engenders more life.
“If I can’t close my sensory gating, then open me wider. Dilate me like a cervix so that I may be the birth canal for stories that are not about human beings and human progress. Let me become a doorway for viruses and ecosystems and fungi and dove song. Let me become a doorway so big and so open that a new way of being can emerge, one not tied to the fiction of human individuals. One that is equally aware of the agony and ecstasy and is allowed to wildly swing out of the window of tolerance, achieving both the valleys and peaks that our culture has denied us. Let me exceed the graph. Let me swing past wellness into something wilder and less predictable.”
From The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand
A sensitive system is often a deeply feeling one, too. When perception is intensified, the nervous system becomes electrified. Signals burst from the amygdala, waves of neurotransmitters crashing into synapses. You want to scream or flap your hands because existence is just too much to handle quietly.
Emotional depth is like the oxygen released from yeast as it digests sugar, making bread. The body takes in its surroundings and produces emotion, ballooning in an organic dance of life and death, making meaning. Awareness is born through experience, through the senses, and through emotional processing.
That’s why sensitive people are oriented toward complexity, depth, and art. They take in so much. As a neurodivergent person, your brain is capable of intensity and handling that intensity.
Your sensory system is your guide.
It helps you see, feel, and be more — more awake, more aware, more alive.
Most of what we call neurodivergence is rooted in the sensory system. It’s the crux of the nervous system where ADHD, autism, and OCD meet (to name a few brain style differences). Attention is modulated through hearing, seeing, and feeling. Compulsions create patterns in sound, speech, and environment. Stimming brings forward touch, smell, or taste to presence the body.
Perhaps the sensory system is a point of references for all mental illness that improves our conceptualization— a perspective that privileges a universal neurology, not vague and disparate categories of symptom interpretation.
Perhaps the sensitive nervous system is one that positions neurodivergence as deeply, critically, and stunningly evolutionary.
So, to end this devotional prayer of reverence to your sensitivity, my sensitivity, and the sensory nature of reality, I offer you an ode:
To you, subtle and remarkable muse,
that strange twilight we call sensitivity —
neither here nor there,
an eternally liminal fabric,
sky and ice,
breath and iris.
You ache, you bend, you twist with glory
around the noble arches of our world.
You shadow me like a spirit of another world,
screaming when I rub skin,
scalding my ears with laughter when honey melts in my mouth,
ecstatic at the clean lines of my to-do list on yellow paper,
lined like dew-dropped flower petals.
With you, I live as if alien,
every moment a fountain of foreign, fresh feast.
To be at once your slave and royalty,
I could live no other way.
Keep it sensory. Keep it sensitive. Keep it stellar.
<3