It's All a Matter of Tuning.

I decided today that there’s a suitable phrase to describe people like me: highly tuned.

It’s the HSP thing that does it; it makes us hyper-aware of every single little nuance which enters our environment, be it a change in the weather, the prevailing mood in a room, the expression in somebody’s eyes, a raindrop touching the skin, an unwanted noise invading our space, a smell that shouldn’t be there, etc, etc. And our emotional response faculty runs on a very high wavelength, too.

I read once that fighter planes are designed to be unstable; it’s their very instability which makes them so manoeuvrable. You don’t sit back in a fighter plane, apparently; you have to consciously fly it the whole time. It’s the same with racing cars; the slightest flick of a thumb at the wrong moment and you’re off into the gravel, the wall, or somebody else’s shiny, million dollar vehicle. And there seems to be some parity here with the HSP type: just one small factor in the wrong place and we come close to going off the rails. It seems we’re designed to be unstable and we can’t help it.

So if you know someone who appears to be unstable, please bear this possibility in mind. You know the sort: the kind who temporarily gives up on life when somebody close by is playing dance music or EastEnders through an open window, thereby screwing up the humming of the bees, the whispering of the breeze, or the little birds singing in the sycamore trees. They’re probably just highly tuned.