The Fictive Kin Chronicles

They say that memories accompanied by strong emotions are encoded more permanently than others.

It’s no wonder, then, that decades later, I can still remember that incident.

My anger at the injustice of it all was visceral: my blood was boiling, and my throat was tightening with the desire to yell something, even as I knew it would be futile.

And my feeling of powerlessness was almost as paralyzing as my rage.

Because even then, I somehow knew that not everyone would have been as upset as I was.

Not everyone would have felt what that “big girl” was feeling, the way I did.

I felt her dawning realization of what the boys were going to do to her. 

I could almost “see” her humiliation, her anger, and her sense of betrayal.

At the time, though, I didn't know that that’s what I was doing.

…

For Highly Sensitive People who don’t grow up knowing that’s what they are, moving through the world, on a day to day basis, can sometimes feel a little bit - or a lot! - “extra”. 

I’ve often described it as having your senses dialled up to eleven, all the damn time. 

But for HSPs who are also “melanated and marginalized”, some of our sensitivities are dialled up to, like, eleventy-zillion. Unlike the neurobiological trait that “causes” our HSP-ness, this form of sensitivity has a socio-political basis.

In the late 19th century, African American scholar / activist W. E. B. Du Bois developed a concept that speaks to this: double consciousness.

This is the other reason I felt I couldn’t say anything to the boys who threw down that girl’s lunchbox: even at the tender age of four, I’d already begun developing a double consciousness of my own Blackness.

As such, I knew that not only would those boys have ignored me because I was a little girl, they would have ignored me because I was a little Black girl.