Lightbearer's Library

Sometimes you can spend years putting your heart and soul into something, and still reach a point where you wonder if it's worth carrying on. You keep trying to figure out what you could do differently, but after a while, it can become difficult to believe that things are ever going to change. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially when it comes to highly sensitive men who are c...

I've been thinking a lot about how painful it is when someone we love, someone who has known us for years, no longer wants us in their life because we see the world differently. I think this can be particularly difficult for those of us who are highly sensitive, who think deeply about things and don't necessarily arrive at the same beliefs as the people around us. It's not that we e...

Sometimes you reach a point in life where you look back at the man you were ten or twenty years ago and wonder how it is that he seemed to have his life more together than you do now. For a highly sensitive man, that can be a particularly painful place to find yourself. Maybe you had a career, a business, a home, or a vision of the life you thought you were building. And then something changed. No...

Sometimes, a difficult conversation can undo a sense of peace that took a long time to find. If you're a highly sensitive person (HSP), an INFJ, or an INFP, you may know what it's like to feel emotionally drained by relationship conflict that seemingly comes out of nowhere. My husband and I had one of those moments this morning. And it reminded me how difficult conflict can be when you&a...

We can know that stepping away from family is the right thing for our mental health, and still feel deeply sad that we won't be there for family gatherings. Because knowing why we had to leave doesn't mean we stop wishing things could have been different. I've been sitting with this lately, especially around the holiday gatherings that come with this time of year. I think part of wh...

Sometimes you reach a point in life where you know you can't keep living the way you have been, but you have no idea what to do instead. You look at the life you've built, and you can't quite see where to go from here. I've been thinking about how we can arrive at this place after years of making small choices that seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Maybe we made th...

There comes a point after you've given someone so many chances, tried so hard to keep the peace, and bent over backwards so many times that, when they violate you again, something inside you quietly says, “I’m done.” I’ve been thinking about how different that moment looks from the outside. To others, it might look like coldness. Like you suddenly stopped caring. But they haven't seen th...

Sometimes life can look completely fine from the outside, and yet you find yourself wondering, how did I get here? You’ve done what needed to be done. You worked, paid the bills, cared for people, carried your responsibilities. And somewhere along the way, perhaps without even realizing it, you stopped consciously choosing where your life was going. I’ve been thinking about that feeling of waking...

We can spend years trying to escape the overwhelm of life. But what happens when we finally stop distracting ourselves and we're left wondering what we're supposed to do with our lives? I've been thinking about this because my husband and I have both been feeling this sense of boredom lately. As highly sensitive people, we've stopped doing many of the things we used to use to p...

Sometimes it feels like being kind gives people one more reason to screw us over when we're highly sensitive. I’ve been thinking about this after what’s been happening for my husband and me this week. We try to give people the benefit of the doubt. We try to be thoughtful, to take responsibility for our part, to understand what might be happening underneath a difficult situation. And sometime...

Maybe one of the hardest parts of being rejected for your height is knowing that the woman never really got to see what was underneath it. You may have hoped that if she got to know you... your way of thinking, your feelings, the person you are... she might see that your height didn't matter so much. However, when a woman does get to know you, and your height still matters to her, that pain c...

Perhaps the hardest part isn't surviving one tragedy. It's when they begin to pile on top of one another, until the weight of it all becomes overwhelming. I've been thinking about what happens to a highly sensitive man when loss keeps arriving in different forms. Someone dies. A relationship ends. Someone betrays you. Work disappears. Your identity changes. You lose a home. And some...

Have you ever had the experience of feeling like a ghost? You can be there, listening, participating, being kind, and somehow still feel like they don't really see you. I've been thinking about what it means to be seen, and how different it can feel when someone is actually curious about what's underneath the part of us they can see. I think of myself as an iceberg in this way. Ther...

Maybe you look around at other people your age and wonder why they seem to have found their place in life while you're still trying to figure out where you belong. I've been thinking about this lately because I've heard from so many men who feel like late bloomers. Some are younger men who haven't found the relationship, career, or direction they thought they were supposed to h...

Sometimes we don't realize we've been triggered until we're already somewhere completely different from where we started. If you're a highly sensitive man, you may know this experience: something happens, or someone says something, and suddenly you're caught in a swirl of thoughts and emotions. Sometimes it's obvious what happened. Other times, an hour later, you find...

Realizing that someone you love has been lying to you can change the way you see the entire relationship. For highly sensitive men, that realization can be especially painful when it's someone you've allowed very close to you. A partner. A parent. A family member. Someone you've trusted enough to build your understanding of reality around what they told you. And then something happe...

 Sometimes, as a highly sensitive man, you can find yourself wondering whether you're still useful in the world. Maybe something has changed. You've lost a job, retired, gone through a divorce, or simply found yourself in a period of depression or deep uncertainty. And when the life you knew begins to change around you, I wonder if another question can begin to surface underneath it all:...

Sometimes the hardest things to grieve are the things nobody else sees as a loss. I’ve been thinking about how, as a highly sensitive man, you can grieve things that are difficult to explain to anyone else. A dream that never happened. A childhood you didn't get to have. The life you thought you might have with someone. A part of yourself that you had to leave behind. Even a world that once f...

🌿 Welcome to our first LIVE Library Gathering The Library has reached 5,000 subscribers, and I wanted to celebrate this milestone by actually sitting down together for a while. This will be a relaxed Q&A and hangout. Bring a question, bring your curiosity, or simply come and spend some time here. We can talk about things like: - sensitivity and being highly sensitive - identity and finding yo...

Sometimes being friendless doesn't mean having nobody around you. It can mean having people in your life, but no one you feel really sees you. I’ve been thinking about how painful that can be for a highly sensitive man. Especially when something difficult happens and what you need isn't someone to pull you out of it, but someone who is willing to sit with you in the deeper parts of what...

Sometimes we finally find the courage to tell someone what we’re going through, and somehow we feel worse after the conversation than we did before. Not because they meant any harm, or because their advice was necessarily wrong, but because perhaps what we really needed was simply for someone to listen. I’ve been thinking about why we give advice when someone shares something difficult with us. Ma...

I wonder if sometimes what hurts isn't actually feeling rejected, but feeling forgotten. Because I feel like being rejected means someone has seen you first. And there can be something especially painful about feeling like no one is really seeing you at all. I wonder how many highly sensitive men know this feeling of becoming increasingly absent from the world — especially those who identify...

I wonder if you've spent so much of your life protecting the sensitive part of yourself that, over time, the protection starts to feel like who you are. For some highly sensitive men (HSPs), INFJs and INFPs, that armor might look like becoming strong, independent, successful, useful, quiet, funny, agreeable, or simply very good at reading the room. There were probably reasons you learned thes...

Have you ever had the strange feeling that you don't really know who you are? For many highly sensitive men (HSPs), especially INFJs and INFPs, I wonder if it can happen after years of adapting to the people and expectations around us — until we become more familiar with who we needed to be than who we actually are. I think there are three ways that we can be unknown. Nobody knows me. I don&a...

I wonder how many highly sensitive men have spent so much of their lives feeling different that they may have quietly stopped expecting to ever feel like they belong anywhere. I’ve been thinking about this after reading through the responses from the community about where they have found a sense of belonging in their lives. So many of them made me wonder about something deeper: what happens when y...