I can't handle the world

but I wasn't meant to

Lately I’ve been coming to terms with my limits. In particular, the limits of my ability to handle what’s hard in the world. I use the word “hard” because the other words often hurt too much. It seems every time I open my phone and scroll into unknown territory (social media, google searches, an unknown essay on Substack) I come up against something extremely painful about our current time on Earth. Things my mind deem not only unacceptable, but inconceivable. I often end up navigating away after these things come up. But no matter how quickly I close the window, they linger.

I was like this as a child, I know. I was both transfixed and hijacked by the horrors of the world. The more I was exposed to the reality of our planet’s pain—extinction, genocide, oppression— the more repulsion and fascination became a twinning force in my mind. I couldn’t understand how these things could possibly be real, and because I couldn’t understand it, I needed to understand it. It was a loop that often kept me up late at night, pondering, worried, vulnerable.

As I got older, I learned how to harden my exterior into a sea wall amidst an ocean of inputs. I was still just as sensitive on the inside, but I got better at shielding myself. At only half listening. At using the panicked activation I felt inside of me to literally act, organize, rally. At having a nervous system that was always just one tick away from dropping over the edge.

Then I had a child— and all the protective systems fell way.

Very early on in postpartum I realized that I simply didn’t have a single sea wall left. My body had opened to bring a child to the world and with that opening, the entire ocean rushed in. I didn’t look at social media or the news for months after her birth. I had planned on taking such a leave, giving myself full permission to be in the cocoon of the fourth trimester, but I also knew I couldn’t handle those inputs if I tried. Even reading Harry Potter made me weep.

Once I emerged out of the fourth trimester and my hormones seemed to be stabilizing, I kept waiting for the walls to build back up again. But they didn’t. They haven’t. Or maybe they have, but they’re less like sea walls and more like the porous rocks surrounding a tidepool. If the tides are high enough most things can still get in.

Just like when I was a kid, sometimes I get frustrated with my own sensitivity. In my most fragile moments I wonder…everyone else seems to be handling this world, and the light that winks out at certain depths, why can’t I? But the further I wade into motherhood, especially the mothering of a very young child, I realize—I can’t handle this world, and that’s ok…because I wasn’t meant to.

I hear many seasoned mothers talk about the great psychic opening that happened for them after their first child was born. The intuition and inner knowing that came online once they stepped over the threshold.

As mothers, we’re literally created by nature to be extra-sensory. To know, without looking, where our child is. To hear what they need even when they can’t speak. To have part of our mind be scanning the environment at every moment— alert to any dissonant ripples in the field. We’re protecting, and growing, at least two bodies at any given time. And so we become extra-sensory.

It's extraordinary, in the truest sense of the world—and it’s also exhausting. As someone who has identified as highly sensitive her whole life, I thought I was used to going through life with saltwater lapping, always, at my periphery. But if the overwhelm of regular life is high tide, motherhood is the deep ocean itself.

Whenever I slam the computer shut to avoid seeing the rest of a video. Or stop a friend mid-sentence as they tell me the latest horror story from the news, I sometimes feel like I’m a jellyfish living in a world that wasn’t built for me.

But I also realize that none of us are living in the world we were built for.