I recently found out that I am a “highly sensitive person (HSP)”.
Now honestly, I have known this all my life, but sometimes, it takes a someone else to give a concrete term to bring to life what you already know.
What HSP has always meant for me is a gift. I can read people and situations incredibly well. Scary well. It’s almost a sixth sense. (Of course, it has it’s bad parts too, but its beyond the purpose of this post.)
So with that in mind, let’s review the thought from yesterday, that people put up a facade when dealing with others to protect themselves and their, oh so fragile, self-esteem.
There is a certain percentage of the population that I bump into, that really bothers me. They are loud. They are outgoing. They are smiley.
Now don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends, are loud and outgoing, and in the past a few of them have also been quite smiley.
However, these people that I meet, rub me the wrong way. My spidey sense goes off. These guys are faking it. I just couldn’t stand being around them.
It’s interesting, but these people, often find themselves in positions of power. This is NOT to say that everyone with these attributes in positions of power are like this, but it seems to me that a higher proportion than expected of these people get to these positions.
You have probably met similar people as salesmen along the way.
I realized recently that I don’t have much of a tolerance for these people, and perhaps it is because, I myself was being fake about who I was, in my own way, and that internal struggle made me very uncomfortable. I wonder if now that I am being myself, if I will find myself more tolerant them, and just feel sorry for them, and their unfortunate situation. I hope so.
The general take away from this is that when we are frustrated at someone else and judgmental towards them, the true reason is often because we are really frustrated at ourselves for not fixing our own issues – otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have even noticed the issue with them in the first place.
In fact, I recently heard an old saying that talks directly to this point, “when you point your finger towards someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you.” So remember, that next time you don’t like something about someone else, perhaps it is time to look within and see what you don’t like about yourself.