Slow Transitions and Mourning the Places You Knew Best
Would you go to a library that’s 10 minutes from your house or a library that’s 45 minutes away? If you’re highly sensitive, you may just pick the latter and here’s why. The farther library is the one you’ve gone to for years, it has your favorite cozy window nook to curl up in to read for hours, and even has a soothing waterfall outside. While it’s counterintuitive for most people, you choose the familiar library and take the longer drive.
When I moved to a completely different part of the San Francisco Bay Area last summer, I took the long journey back to my favorite library many times, even though there are several within a few minutes of my new home. Moving is disruptive as you know, but a large part of that disturbance is losing comfortable familiarity.
The Places You Know Best
Think about the places you know with all your senses (smells, sights, sounds, textures) that bring you comfort and that instantly help you relax when you walk through the door, that’s the library for me. Your version could be a cafe, church, store, friend’s house, park, or anywhere you can take a deep breath and shut off your mind for a while. These spaces are where the stresses of life temporarily fade into the background. Where is this space for you, whether real, imaginary, or from your memories?
Finding new safe spaces after a move is a type of transition and transitions just don’t happen in big ways like relocating to a new town, but also in so many small moments throughout every single day. Transitions take longer when you’re a highly sensitive person born with a brain that’s wired with an automatic break to pause and reflect before you move from one thing to the next. For smaller moves like going from the car to the house, you’ll pause for a few moments. While more life changing transitions like graduating, starting a new job, having a baby, losing a loved one, or retiring take much longer to acclimate to.
Pause to Reflect
This is part of the reason you may often feel rushed to make a big decision, it takes you longer to speak up in a group, or you need a little extra time to get out of bed in the morning. Of course, there could be other contributing factors such as anxiety, ADHD, or illness, but those little urges to pause to think through a decision or to assess a scene before you step into the crowd, that’s your “behavioral inhibition system” in action. You’re often pausing to check:
Did you think that decision through?
Does everything here look safe?
Are you missing anything?
How will this choice play out down the road?
Anything you need to adjust before moving forward?
Whether it’s an everyday or momentous transition, pausing to check to allow yourself time to settle in can at times be frustrating or even hurtful. Sometimes you get called indecisive, shy, difficult, too slow, or lazy as a result. Despite these criticisms, whether coming from others or self-inflicted, it’s important to remember that taking your time is an advantage! Slowing down greatly reduces mistakes, you’ll consider the impact of your choices on others, and it helps ensure that everyone involved is safe.
Emotionally speaking, you also have time to honor what places, people, and events meant to you during this transition. Moving away from my old library brought up feelings of grief, in many ways it was a loss. I had built a relationship with that space and it became a sanctuary of sorts for me. This new library, where I’m actually writing this blog, is beautiful but not familiar. And sadly there’s no waterfall, but really what library has a waterfall anyway!? I just really love the sound of water and miss its soothing quality.
Finding Familiarity and Comfort
Adjusting to this new library will take time, as with every transition. I still need to figure out the best spots for writing, where to sit when I want to curl up with a book, who the librarians are, and where my favorite sections are. My nervous system needs space to acclimate to the sensory experience of this place and process how it’s different from the last library. Although I was resistant to visiting this library at first because it was unfamiliar and brought up feelings of sadness about my old library, I know I’ll become more comfortable the more I spend time here.
I’ll leave you with a question - are you allowing yourself space to pause and reflect or rushing yourself through those big and small moments? If the former is often true, and it probably is, I invite you to allow a little more space - to take a breath before you pop from checking email to going into a meeting, check in with yourself after a big life change, or give yourself five minutes to allow your eyes to adjust to the morning light before you jump out of bed. What’s the rush, dear HSP?
