The "I Am Sam" Effect

How being an HSP – while making you who you are – sometimes just breaks your heart

Joy Stamp via Unsplash.

The other day I was making a last-minute grocery store stop before heading out of town for the weekend. It was going to be a quick errand: run in, grab a few items, leave. And it was a quick errand, it just surprised me in a way I wasn’t expecting.

See, I had parked near the first entrance of the store, the one where they occasionally have a table or booth set up for a timely cause. Sometimes it’s Girl Scout cookies, sometimes school fundraisers. This time, it was for Veterans Day. At the table sat an elderly man in his full military garb, hat and all. He was talking to a few folks who had stopped by, smiling a warm smile from behind his round spectacles. I rushed past, already feeling something stirring within me. I focused on grabbing my groceries, trying to suppress whatever it was I was feeling. I checked out and headed through the same door I came in. I don’t know why, but I avoided eye contact as he sat there, now alone behind the table. I put my groceries in my car, but still had to return the cart, which meant I had to go back to that same door. I approached, steeling myself. I re-racked my cart with the others, still avoiding his eyes. He was quiet, he didn’t try to push his cause or coax me to talk to him, which sparked a pang of guilt that was ultimately stronger than my sheepishness. I finally looked his way as I turned to leave. He pointed a friendly finger at me, much like my late grandfather would have, and said: “You have a good day.” It was almost a command, but a loving one. It split me right in two. I politely returned the pleasantry but could hardly make it back to my car before I burst into tears. 

To the untrained eye, this might seem silly. How could such a minute interaction muster such a large reaction? Many a man might chalk this up to me “just being a woman,” but I’d like to make it clear that this has very little - if anything - to do with my period. In fact, it has hardly any affiliation with hormones. I was this way before I even hit puberty.

For example, in fourth grade, I openly wept when my class read Where The Red Fern Grows out loud. For those unfamiliar, it’s a coming-of-age story about a boy and his two hunting hounds, Big Dan and Little Ann. You can imagine, as the term “coming-of-age” implies, that the boy ages, and of course, so do his dogs. Spoiler alert: they die. One of them, in fact, dies of a broken heart after the first one goes. As one of my classmates calmly read the scene aloud, I was causing the pages of my book to pucker while I followed along. I looked up, scanning the room through my blurred vision. The reader sounded completely unfazed, and to my surprise, so was most of the class. No one else seemed to be breaking from this wholly heart-wrenching tale. That is, until my eyes found my best friend Marissa, who was - to my great relief - having a similar experience to mine. Yet somehow it was just the two of us feeling more than an entire classroom of children (there may have been one or two others, but they don’t stand out as starkly in my memory).

Then the next year, I remember being in my parents’ minivan with the carpool kids having gone through the McDonald’s drive-through and seeing a man standing outside the front door. He looked to be in his early thirties, disheveled, with baggy, ill-fitting clothing and shaky mannerisms. From what I could tell, he was trying to engage customers as they entered the establishment, not forcefully but in a way that appeared to me like he needed help. I watched as every passing person ignored him. I had the privilege of growing up in a suburban neighborhood where I never really saw homelessness nor mental illness (at least that I was aware of at the time), but I sensed this man was a member of both groups and it shattered me. I – luckily – had been sitting in the back, letting the others sit in the middle seats, and could easily conceal my tears. I watched him through the tinted windows, getting smaller and smaller in both essence and perspective, eventually sitting on the curb, defeated.

It only picks up from there. In seventh grade, I watched I Am Sam at a friend’s house. It sounded like an interesting enough premise, plus it had Dakota Fanning, whom I had seen in other movies I’d liked such as Uptown Girls. However, I was not prepared for the tsunami of emotions that would ensue. It was unbearable to watch a developmentally challenged man be deemed an unfit parent and forced to fight for custody of his child. Even now, I can hardly recount it without tears welling in my eyes. I remember curling up into a ball at the base of my friend’s living room couch and sobbing into my knees. It was the hardest I had ever cried from a movie at that point in my life, and now in my thirties, it still easily remains one of the top five.

As if that wasn’t enough, we read Flowers For Algernon in my eighth grade English class. If you know anything about the story, you know it involves both animals and mental illness and therefore hit me hard. Luckily, the reading assignments were done at home versus read aloud in class, however, once we finished the book, we of course had to watch the movie over the next few periods. I don’t remember now how far into the film I made it before excusing myself. All I know is I didn’t even make it to the bathroom where I could sob in solitude, I just assumed my I Am Sam position out in the empty hallway against the opposite wall. A friend or two might have checked in on me, but ultimately went back into the classroom. Marissa unfortunately wasn’t in my class that year, otherwise I imagine she would have joined me.

I could go on, but these are the moments that stick out in my memory (and prove my point that it has everything to do with who and how I am and nothing to do with post-pubescent hormones). In reflecting, I’ve come to recognize that what these situations have in common is vulnerability. Animals, individuals with mental illness, the elderly – they’re all vulnerable, subject to mistreatment and abandonment. That idea alone is painful enough to reckon with and it becomes unbearable for me to read or watch play out on screen. They make me feel helpless. Which – if I’m being completely and utterly honest with myself – has been a prominent feeling of mine through the entirety of my life. And in the instances where I find myself face to face with them in real life, the guilt is crushing. I’m quick to chastise and shame: Why don’t I volunteer? Why don’t I donate? Why do I look away? Instead, I question and compare: Why am I like this? Am I the only one who feels this way?

For most of my life, thanks to moments like these, I’ve been prone to tears and emotional overwhelm and labeled not just “sensitive,” but “too sensitive,” by friends, family, classmates, and coworkers alike. I didn’t just cry at heartbreaking situations, I cried (and still do) when stressed, frustrated, angry, tired, even happy. In childhood this made me a baby. In adulthood it’s made me a burden. And all my life it’s made me feel alone.

Never until I had a therapist did I learn I am not only perfectly normal, but part of an interesting subset of people. I am an HSP, a highly-sensitive person. What’s more, it’s not a denomination that comes with a connotation, rather it’s a research-backed term coined by clinical psychologist Dr. Elaine Aron. In fact, it has as much to do with physiology as it does psychology. According to Dr. Aron, as summarized by Psychology Today: “Highly-sensitive people are a subset of the population who are high in a personality trait known as sensory-processing sensitivity, or SPS. Those with high levels of SPS display increased emotional sensitivity, stronger reactivity to both external and internal stimuli—pain, hunger, light, and noise—and a complex inner life.” In other words, HSPs have a sensitive nervous system. We react strongly not just emotionally – but physically – to different things within us and around us. It’s not just “in our heads,” it’s in our bodies.

And it's fifteen to twenty percent of the population, which in America equates to fifty million people, according to Dr. Aron’s website. This means I’m not alone in feeling different, nor am I alone in feeling deprioritized. In her book, “The Highly Sensitive Person: How To Thrive When The World Overwhelms You," Dr. Aron states: “In an aggressive culture, non-HSPs are favored, and that fact will be obvious everywhere.” She references a research study comparing elementary school children in Shanghai and Canada. In China, quiet or sensitive children were more respected by their peers, while those in Canada were much less so. In response to this study, Dr. Aron says, “HSPs growing up in cultures in which they are not respected have to be affected by this lack of respect.” This means fifty million of us in the U.S. alone have likely felt this way, not just because of a trait we possess, but because of how our society is structured – because of what it values, and more poignantly what it doesn’t. As a result, Dr. Aron says we HSPs are “prone to low self-esteem because they are not their culture’s ideal.”

If this feeling wasn’t clear enough to me from my experience in grade school, it became all the more obvious in corporate America. From the moment I stepped off the graduation stage and into the workplace I felt like I didn’t belong. I slaved for praise but resented having to climb the ladder and “play the game.” I often felt caged, like the rules were too rigid, and when I was laid off likely due to this defiance, I felt rejected. It turns out, I am not alone in these feelings either. In her book, Dr. Aron says: “The business world is undoubtedly undervaluing its HSPs. People who are gifted and intuitive yet conscientious and determined not to make mistakes ought to be treasured employees. But we are less likely to fit into the business world when the metaphors for achievement are warfare, pioneering, and expansion.” 

Though being an HSP may feel like an uphill battle depending on where you’re born and where you work, it has its advantages too. We are highly intuitive and conscientious; we are aware of others and their feelings, making us attentive partners, friends, and parents. We are contemplative and intellectual; we think before acting and consider all the options based on our prior experience, making us strategic and creative thinkers. Dr. Aron comments on this in her book, stating: “HSPs do more of that which makes humans different from other animals: We imagine possibilities. We humans, and HSPs especially, are acutely aware of the past and future.”

Ultimately, we HSPs are tuned into our environments, often noticing more than the average person and seeing the beauty wherever we go. To Dr. Aron’s point of doing “more of what makes humans different from animals,” our trait, especially when honed, makes us all the more alive. It makes us experience life, in all its euphoria and ecstasy, as well as its sadness and suffering, to the fullest extent. Our ability to revel in the spectrum of human emotion allows us to find greater meaning – to let the lows further highlight the highs, to find deeper purpose and fulfillment.

It’s the “I Am Sam” effect, if you will. It’s what breaks my heart, what causes me to cry at the sight of an elderly veteran at a grocery store donation table, but it’s also a hidden super power (perhaps that’s what “HSP” really stands for). It’s what lets me notice the little things, like the birds on my windowsill or the smiling interactions between strangers, that amalgamate into the bigger things like the good in humanity. It’s what day after day, year after year, fills my cup, connects me to others, and changes my outlook.

It is – ultimately – what makes me who I am.