Sweet friend, you’re not broken.

Have you ever left a party early because the noise, the lights, the sheer number of people talking at once became too much to hold?

Cried at a commercial?

Felt wrecked for hours after a violent scene in a movie, like you’d been hit with kryptonite, the way Superman goes weak the second it’s near him?

Needed a full day, sometimes more, to recover from a weekend that everyone else seemed to bounce right back from?

Has beautiful music ever moved you to tears, or a piece of art stopped you in your tracks, in a way that felt like more than what everyone else around you was feeling? Have you walked through a mall or a crowded store and been hit, almost physically, by the perfume counter or someone’s cologne, long after everyone else stopped noticing it?

Have you been told, in one way or another, that you feel too much? Notice too much? Need too much quiet, too much space, too much time alone to fill back up?

Has a doctor ever told you that you just need to handle your stress better? Have you noticed your hot flashes hit you so much harder than they seem to hit your girlfriends, like everyone else got the mild version and you got the full-force one?

What if it’s not just hormones? What if there’s more to the story?

If any of that sounds like you, I want to say something to you before I say anything else:

I see you.

There is nothing wrong with you.

I didn’t know I was a Highly Sensitive Person until I was 55 years old. And I promise you, I know exactly what it feels like to spend a lifetime believing you’re simply too much, when the truth is, you were built to take in more of this world than most people do.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me decades ago. Psychologist Elaine Aron, PhD, spent her career researching this trait, and she gave it a name: Highly Sensitive Person, or HSP. It does not mean thin-skinned. It does not mean fragile. It means high sensory processing — a nervous system designed to sense everything, sound, light, emotion, subtlety, with more intensity than most people’s.

That isn’t a flaw. It’s a trait.

And roughly 1 in 5 people carry it, women and men both.

I’m not going to bury you in research today. I only want you to know that what you’ve felt your whole life is real, it’s documented, and it runs in families the way eye color does. It even shows up in over 100 other species besides our own. Nature keeps this trait around on purpose. It wouldn’t have survived this long if it weren’t worth having.

The front, open and offered outward, is the gift: the empathy that lets you feel what someone else is carrying before they say a word. The intuition that picks up on what’s underneath the surface. The depth with which you experience beauty, connection, and love.

The back of that same hand is the cost: the overwhelm, the exhaustion, the tears that come faster than you’d like, the recovery time nobody else seems to need.

Both sides are real. Neither one is something to apologize for.

I cry easily, and it goes back as far as I can remember. More than once, I’ve been told to “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” Maybe you’ve heard some version of that too. If you have, I imagine you learned, the way I did, to distrust the very thing that makes you who you are.

I still cry easily today. And that kryptonite feeling I mentioned above? It’s very real, and I can tell you the exact day it hit me.

I was invited on a double date to see the new Spider-Man movie. I thought about it and told myself, it’s not Batman. It’s not Mission Impossible with all that violence. It’s just Spider-Man. I brought earplugs anyway, and covered my eyes through most of it, because even that was too intense for me. When we walked out of the theater, I felt like every ounce of my energy had been drained out of me, exactly like kryptonite exposure.

It took four hours for my nervous system to settle back down to baseline.

Four hours, from one movie.

That was never me being dramatic. That is a nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do.

I carried this into a career in critical care nursing, one of the most overstimulating places to work in all of healthcare. And here’s what I want you to hear: the very same sensitivity that could wreck me after a movie also let me sense what a critically ill patient’s body was telling me before the monitors confirmed it, and what their families were carrying in the hallway when nobody said a word out loud.

The gift and the cost were never two different things. They were the same thing, showing up in two different rooms.

If you’ve spent your life feeling like the exception, like the one who can’t keep up, who needs too much, who takes things too hard, I want you to sit with this instead:

You are not the exception to how the world is supposed to work.

You are half of how it’s supposed to work.

What I Want for You

For most of my life, I thought my sensitivity was something to manage, apologize for, or push through. I’ve come to believe instead that it was one of the ways God wired me to notice what needed noticing, in myself, and in the people I love and care for.

The goal was never to become less sensitive.

The goal is to finally believe there was never anything wrong with you to begin with.

Roughly 1 in 5 of us carry this trait. You may already know someone who does. You may be realizing, right now, reading this, that it’s you.

If it is, welcome. I see you, and I’m so glad you’re here.

Here’s something else I want you to know is coming. This trait isn’t only about your nervous system. It’s genetic, and those same genes touch your hormones too, in more ways than most people realize. Over the coming weeks, I’ll walk you through exactly how: why so many of us run hot on cortisol, why our bodies can struggle to clear estrogen the way they should, and why that combination shows up as mood swings, anxiety, and exhaustion during the very seasons of life when we need steadiness the most.

For now, I just want you to have this:

You were never too much.

You were always simply, wonderfully, built different.

Curious whether this is you? Elaine Aron, PhD, offers a free self-test on her website, hsperson.com — it takes just a few minutes, and many women tell me it was the first time they saw themselves on a page.

Until next week, honor yourself. Love yourself.

Warmest,

Lori Finlay, NP, CNS