Lady B and the HSP.

The ghost of the Lady Bella continues to haunt me day and night. She fills my sleep with disturbing dreams. She shows me waking visions of events unseen by my physical eyes, visions which arrest my breathing and force me to change the record before I suffocate. She taunts me with recollections of fleeting but precious moments pregnant with real or imagined significance. She is quietly insistent, and her quietness was always what made her irresistible. Her human alter-ego has now decamped to somewhere far off, like Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse or maybe the edge of space and time, but her ghost remains close and visits frequently.

My Ego tells me that there is no such thing as the ghost of the Lady B; she is merely a figment of a fevered and delusional imagination. She is largely, he says, a symptom of the curse allegedly attributable to the HSP gene which conveys to the recipient the twin qualities of hyper-awareness and torrid emotional response. It’s just part of my general strangeness and will go of its own accord eventually. I’ve been hearing such reassurance for some years now, and the issue continues to get worse.

Maybe that’s why my Super Ego steps in and overrules his junior, advising him that reality is rarely that straightforward. He tells me to ignore the rationalist who would insist that the haunting is a simple product of some mental abnormality for which a pill may be prescribed to facilitate exorcism. He suggests that there really is some mysterious connection at work of a type unknown to rationalists and scientists, and that it’s more a matter of managing it than curing it. Being an HSP is not the cause, but the means by which I am made aware of it.

So to whose advice should I attach most credence? Well, it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that for all the disturbance she causes me – sometime reaching a debilitating level – I quite like being haunted by the Lady B. She adds colour to a grey world, and that can’t be a wholly bad thing.