A highly sensitive friend shared her screen with me on a Zoom call as she logged into one of her online business accounts. She’d asked me for support to accomplish an odious task. A faceless entity somewhere out there in the online ether required her to jump through an administrative hoop. …. The whole thing put my friend into a sort of fugue state.

Where are my people? Gosia Poraj has begun writing a book called The Nature of Sensitivity that provides an answer to my question. I say she has "begun writing" because she describes it as a living book: "Imagine a book that’s alive. After all, which book isn’t? As ideas continually evolve, so too do the chapters."

On video calls with groups of highly sensitive, introverted, intuitive people, I often notice how many of us wear glasses. I’m not surprised—and I have theories about why. Years ago, when I was in my early thirties and living in Seattle, I met a man who helped people heal their eyesight to the point of no longer needing to wear corrective lenses, a possibility I hadn’t known existed.

Imagine arriving in an unfamiliar town and heading straight to the local Highly Sensitive Haven, tucked away on a quiet side street a gentle walk from the busier commercial streets. You’ve arrived a day early for a holiday vacation with your extended family, and want to settle in on your own before you venture out to meet with anyone.

I stumbled into Kening Zhu’s world a while ago, in the midst of an internal reckoning about my work and business. I’d been scouring the internet, as we do, hunting for tools and advice to help me sort out the conflict between doing what I wanted to do in my business the way I wanted to do it—the way I felt intuitively drawn to do it, versus doing the things I was “supposed to” do…

To bumble is to take uncertain action. Bumbling, fumbling, floundering engagement with the material world educates differently, opens portals to new dimensions not available when we only think about taking action. If you want something and don’t know how to get it, try blundering forward. The bumble road is open to any endeavor…

On an internet call with a highly sensitive friend in another country, we commiserated over the wish to have more local friends, and then touched on the challenge of finding them. We don’t want more of just any type of local friends. We want friends who can listen with full hearts in addition to talking about themselves.

It makes sense to me that those of us who are odd ducks would yearn to belong somewhere, somehow, and would often have trouble finding such a place. With hindsight, I see how much my misfit discomfort prompted me to search far and wide for somewhere to relax. Where could I feel like myself? Often, that "place" was in my mind or inside studious quests for information as I followed my curiosity.

I first learned about elevenie poems when I lived in Germany and attended intensive German language classes. For many days I showed up with my classmates, studied the material, participated in exercises, and did my homework. I loved those classes because they clued me in to linguistic secrets and I inevitably also learned more about English as well.

A wrestling match with perfectionism can be debilitating to the point that nothing gets finished. On the other hand, if you know your writing could be better, when do you stop trying to improve a piece so you can let it go and move on? As a frequent rider on the perfectionism train, I know firsthand the effects of this particular struggle.