When your calm HSP life has been shaken up, it helps to notice that along with the stress comes aliveness.  

My partner (who is also a highly sensitive person) and I lead a calm HSP life. Or we did, until three weeks ago. That’s when we brought home this beautiful creature—maybe to foster, maybe to keep.

My son rescued him from the street. He was incredibly sweet when we met him. He’s clearly very people oriented, and, as we were soon to discover, very smart. In the end, it was our house for him, or the animal shelter. Neither of us has had our own pet before. We took a chance and brought him home.

So much, as I said, for our calm, peaceful life. Arjuna* blew in like a tornado, and not a kittenish one. He could care less about chewing shoelaces or practicing his pouncing. He was a warrior with one object: food. He followed us around relentlessly. He meowed loudly and attacked our legs, intensifying the onslaught if we went anywhere near the kitchen without feeding him.

Clearly, Arjuna had had to use all his wits, his guts, and his daring to provide fend off starvation. As far as he was concerned, he was entirely responsible for feeding himself. From one moment to the next, we’d transform in his eyes from possible sources of food to giant predators from hell trying to get between him and his next meal.

He’d inhale his food in sixty seconds, then leap onto the dinner table to sample our plates, hissing when we set him back down on the floor. His food fixation was, or is, so intense that the vet was able to ream the ear mites out of his ears with an eight-inch Q-tip and give him his shots, all without Arjuna blinking an eye. They just kept feeding him treats.

Big changes (or many small changes) in routine

For the first week, one of us had to keep Arjuna with us at all times. He isn’t neutered yet (that will change on November 25) and we’d been warned to expand his territory in the house very gradually. It was like having a toddler—with claws and a vertical reach of 10 feet.

He’d get snarly and hissy with us when he perceived us as getting in the way of whatever he needed to be doing. We’d have to put him in his “safe room.” I felt guilty. I had to remind myself over and over that our downstairs bathroom may be small, but it’s huge compared to a cage at the animal shelter.

As we navigated all this, I became acutely conscious in a new way of my habits, my reactions, my emotions… and of my relationship with my partner. We had made the decision together to bring Arjuna home with us. Thank God for that, because the required cat vigilance, combined with the extreme tension in the air around the election here in the U.S., made that first week in particular a very tough one.

It’s much easier now: Arjuna has settled enough to be out and about on his own in the house. Right now, he’s sleeping in front of his favorite spot, a heating vent under the kitchen cabinets. In the ensuing peace and quiet, though, I’ve found myself wondering why I was so stressed. People adopt cats all the time, after all—multiple cats, even. I feel the need, now that the dust has settled a bit, to ponder and process the ways this cat has moved my life around.

An explosion of transitions

I generally try to focus on one thing at a time. As we all know, nothing sends an HSP into overarousal more quickly than multiple things coming at her at once. Now, overnight, I had to find a way to keep an eye on Arjuna, too. This created a constant stream of small transitions—another source of overarousal for me as an HSP.

Repeatedly, I’d shift my attention away from what I was doing in order to check what he was doing. I was perfectly willing to do this. However, the constant vigilance fried my HSP brain.

In those first few days, he explored every nook and cranny of the house. He figured out how to open the kitchen cabinet where the trash can hides. He rifled through the recycling. He somehow made it onto the top of the kitchen cabinets (to descend, he used the stainless-steel range hood as a slide.)

He even crawled behind the freezer drawer while we had it open, leaving me terrified for a moment that I might have to pull him out by the tail. I found this hilarious, hair-raising, and, overall, exhausting.

A deep sense of responsibility

Highly sensitive people as a group are intensely conscientious. I know this. Even so, I could not have anticipated how much I would take Arjuna’s welfare to heart. He’s a live creature, in our care.

I could not have predicted that I would allow the emergency vet to put their “high estimate” of $2500 on my credit card when he fell ill nine days into his time here (the bill in the end was $1100.) I actually put the charge on my own card, not the joint card I share with my partner, because he was in Somalia, unavailable for consultation. I felt I needed to take responsibility for the expenditure if he wasn’t on board with it.

This HSP conscientiousness is a wonderful thing. It also adds to your stress when you are trying to make decisions with incomplete information and high stakes. I felt that keenly.

Creativity

I would never have guessed the level of care and creativity I’d be moved to put into figuring out how to help Arjuna come out of survival mode. Who knew that I’d now be the one rifling through the recycling, looking for containers I could repurpose into food puzzles?

Given that Arjuna is fixated on food, though, these puzzles have proved to be a game changer. My son’s housemate lent us a wobbly toy that releases one treat at a time if the cat bats it in just the right way. He loves it. It slows him way down…and I think he feels more secure having control over some of his food acquisition—that old familiar feeling of using his wits to scavenge for food.

Imaginative empathy

I’ve had to call up all my HSP powers of imaginative empathy to try to understand what was going on with Arjuna, sensing how we could help him settle down enough that he could live inside— whether with us, or with an even more suitable owner. This empathy, along with my HSP eye for subtle observations, has proved a powerful force.

We quickly saw how utterly food-motivated Arjuna was. We pondered together how to use this constructively. He used to attack my legs while I prepared his food. Now, as a result of many observations and behavioral experiments, he waits patiently at my feet. It’s a massive change, and I feel a deep sense of accomplishment in having helped bring it about.

Huge unknowns

Neither of us has owned a cat before, let alone taken in a stray. We had no idea what we were getting into. Our brains went into overarousal contemplating the sheer number of unknowns. Would he try to eat the plants? If so, which ones were poisonous? Should we let him watch “cat TV” out the window, or might he end up spraying in the house if he saw another cat? What would he do if left alone in a room? Was it worth paying considerably more for his neutering in order to have it done within two weeks instead of within two months?

In the moment, I found this overarousal unpleasant, for sure. But another unexpected thing was happening: my brain and my nervous system were being exercised and stretched in a new way and that felt really good.

I’ve been doing a new exercise program for the past 11 weeks that uses weights, bands and body weight in a strenuous way. It’s hard work while I’m doing it, and my body feels fantastic afterwards, stronger and suffused with well-being. This cat experience has done that for my brain and my nervous system. My stress spikes way up with him at moments, but I feel more alive as I meet the challenges.

It’s good to stir things up

I’m always going on about the importance to HSPs of a sturdy, flexible personal infrastructure with good habits and routines. I believe in all that. I practice it, too. However, this Arjuna experience has reminded me of the importance of breaking the rules sometimes: risking overwhelm, risking chaos, risking not knowing how it’s all going to work out.

I’ve been reminded that—

• Overarousal, stress, and not-knowing are not intrinsically bad. They can be unpleasant in the moment, but they stretch me and increase my capacity for tolerating discomfort.
• It’s OK to listen to your spiritual intuition and take risks. In fact, it’s the only way to grow.
• Truly opening your heart to another living being—human or animal—is an act of powerful vulnerability, in the best kind of way. It can be incredibly stressful, and it is supremely rewarding.
• With our empathy, our imaginations, our deep care and conscientiousness, and our powers of subtle observation, HSPs are uniquely suited to take this risk. We just need practices in place to deal with the occasional overwhelm.
• There’s nothing like having a purring cat in your lap.

Cheers to having our calm HSP life shaken up. It may not be easy or comfortable, but it’s tremendously alive. And extra treats to Arjuna, for doing the shaking.

*Arjuna is the name of a warrior from the Indian epic poem, the Bhagavad Gita. It also means “silver.”

Image: ©2024 Scout Elder. Thank you, Scout!