intuition

I am unbearable to watch tv with.

Not in the old person way where I interject “oooh, isn’t this the guy who was in that movie that we saw that one time in the theater when the popcorn was burnt?” Although, that’s probably coming for me soon. I apologize in advance.

My personal affliction is keen pattern recognition. Doesn’t matter how well-written or how well-directed (in fact, the better done the production, the more likely it is to mimic real life patterns that my brain has scanned and parsed), I don’t just know what’s going to happen, I know what they’re going to say as it’s happening. That’s a very long sentence. I know.

I’d say it’s as annoying for me as it is for anyone sitting with me, but that’s not true. I fucking hate surprises. So it doesn’t bother me one bit to know what’s coming. And I married a man who hates spoilers. But I’d bite a hole through my tongue before I could hold in every prediction.

I’m sorrrrrry. But I’ll do it again.

Pattern recognition, paired with a deeply intuitive nature, means people don’t surprise me very often, either. I know I’m not the only one who walks into a room and can read immediately what the vibe is. I know things without knowing them. If I have a dream about you, you can bet it’s coming true in one way or another because I am dialed in. Vibe is everything. And I can usually sense if the person I’m talking to is being genuine within a few sentences. Usually.

But when people do surprise me, especially when they let me down, I don’t recover easily. I get so hurt and so angry at myself. How did I miss it? I should have seen that coming. Case in point, Artie. I should have seen ego, entitlement, and aggression but I missed it.

Or maybe I just didn’t want to see it. My particular handicap is that I want people to be…good. At least not hurtful.

The other day, I watched my dog race to the back fence, just so excited to greet whoever was passing by at the time. It was a man who was friendly and a dog who was…not. The dog barked menacingly but my silly human in a dog suit just stood there, tail furiously wagging. I said, to no one in particular, “That dog has no self-preservation instincts.”

Ahem.

Mental Health Instagram loves to point out that highly intuitive / highly sensitive people are that way because it’s a trauma response. Yes, I had to intuit a lot as a kid to gauge my own emotional and physical safety. But that can’t be the whole picture. I think some of our personality traits are honed by experience rather than created by them. I see it in my own children and they live in a stable, loving environment.

I firmly believe that high sensitivity is a feature, not a bug. But damn if it doesn’t require you to also develop some solidly aggressive self-preservation skills. And that, unfortunately, has not come naturally to me. I just want to stand at the back gate furiously wagging my tail.