Dear Lizzie1813,

I am super sensitive too.

What helps me is having an area of my life that I am proud of and is untouchable by others. For example, I live to try to help people who are suffering from severe depression. This gives great meaning to my life. Some people have told me that they even thought that my words helped save their life.

I figure that saving even a single human life is one of the if not the greatest thing a human being can accomplish in life. In having this mission in life, I am content to let other aspects of my life slide. My relationships are not ideal. I could be wiser, braver, more ambitious, more successful and so on. But I let these goals slide since my main goal is helping others.

When people criticize me or reject me for this or that reason, I realize that these actions do not touch the core of my meaning in life. This enables me to take a "so what" attitude to the negativity that others direct towards me. As long as I have something that gives my life meaning, that core is basically untouchable.

This seems to help me to be less sensitive to negativity directed towards me. I still get upset, but when I think about my mission in life, it puts things in perspective and I tend to calm down.

I think that perhaps many people do not have a sense of perspective when it comes to things. They treat all weaknesses and mistakes as equal when they can never be equal. For example, a couple of men in the last 100 years caused the destruction of tens of millions of men, women and children through genocide and campaigns of forced starvation. I know that I have not caused the destruction of tens of millions of people or millions or hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands or thousands or hundreds of people and so on. So I consider the things people criticize me for to be pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

I once watched a parent criticizing a child for picking his nose in public. What got me was that this parent was treating this child as though picking his nose was equivalent to causing genocide. How ridiculous. I'm not saying that picking one's nose in public is necessarily a great thing. But it is not "bad" in the same way as causing the destruction of tens of millions of people is bad.

These kinds of thoughts help me to be less sensitive to the negativity of others. Hopefully others here will see your post and share what helps them. Being sensitive is a heavy burden to carry. It can be a crushing weight sometimes. I hope you find things that help you. Sorry that I could not be helpful to you!

Sincerely yours, Yao Wen