1. People, being the nutcases and sticks in the mud that they are, will not allow you to forge your own way in the world very far from how they have originally conceptualized your identity. And if they have a particular beef with this identity, you had better just give up and allow them to spar with the shadows. You are never going to change their minds or convince them.
2. People abandon the concept of objectivity, and then expect you to be able to explain to them, in objective terms, why they should treat you better. Once again, you’d better give up the ghost, and depart from this world — it would be easier.
3. My upbringing in the very formative years was about 100 times better than most people’s have been. There were some regrettable aspects but mostly everything was in order and on course. My parents abandoned me to being brought up by nature — but in a mild, and very decent way, with lots of respect for nature and the world around us.
4. Contemporary society creates a kind of general sickness, and so there is no point pointing out that you, in particular, feel “sick”. This is normative and considered the same for everyone.
5. Chicken psychology. When humans feel enlightened they like to refer to how they have a chicken psychology. There is a “pecking order” and there are males, there are females, and everybody is biologically determined in this way.
6. Much of human society really does run on the chicken psychology of the pecking order, and most people really are at peace with this./

I am not sure, but there seems to be something in the human psyche about a desire to feel real by experiencing the full range of human experiences. I think it is a mistaken way to try to return to our primeval origins, where everyone is equal.

But in a society where some dominate as a matter of course, and others submit, one may only experience just one side of the equation — thus the phenomenon of sado-masochism, in a class based society. (This also relates to gender distinctions, traditionally, as well.)

If we experience ourselves as always being viewed as powerful, and always having more control over our circumstances than others do — and maybe more control than we really need — a masochistic counter-position may start to be appealing to us.

But as the contents of the question posed here also reveals, the masochistic emotional side of things does not really put one in touch with reality, only with a temporary emotional state, and the reality of the situation is what remains in the end, causing one to feel sad.

Hmmm… The use of that term, “highly sensitive person” really begs the question — because nobody has yet established what a “highly sensitive person” is. Indeed all the definitions from the Internet tends to only make the term more confusing and obscure.

For instance, very different types of things are collated together to try to paint a picture of this “highly sensitive person”. One of the definitions is that they have a weak physiology, with lots of grief from the environment around them. But that sort of thing is likely to be caused by a build up of toxins in their system, due to a high level of industrial pollution and low food quality.

Another, seemingly randomly added component is “artistic skill”. But let me tell you that artistic skill — the having it or not having it — does not work this way. One does not by any means acquire the ability to perceive or to convey one’s perceptions of the world on the basis of being “highly sensitive”. Rather, what I think happens, which is to say where there is deemed to be any correlation at all between “high sensitivity” and artistic capacity is due to the ideology of Capitalism, whereby those who do not wish to compete in cut-throat enterprises find themselves discarded on the pile of rejects, which consequently attracts the term, “highly sensitive”. In this context, this term is pejorative, and it should be understood that this is so, rather than trying to pretend that being appraised negatively is somehow a blessing in disguise.

So ,my view is that mostly it pertains to wishful thinking when people adopt the nomenclature that labels them as “highly sensitive”. It makes sense that people would want to see something good in what is really very bad indeed, because it excuses them from having to do something about the bad thing. And the bad thing is Capitalism. It is bad because life should be about much more than struggling for survival whilst stabbing one’s neighbor in the throat to get what one wants. And industrial pollution, and the production of food that is not rich enough to give one a robust constitution — that is also bad. There is no point pretending any differently. You will certainly not be the next Tchaikovsky on the basis that your system had been damaged by modern living. You need to toughen up and face this fact much more realistically.

And whilst we are talking about being realistic — yes, there is actually such a thing a bullying, and it is not a product of one’s perception, whether “sensitive” or not. People do get bullied under the current system. They also got bullied in the past, under different systems. Being bullied is not a feature of our imaginations, in the majority of the time, and “toughening up” is not the complete answer, either, because one would have to toughen up a great deal to overthrow a system that is larger than the individual. In fact, one would have to be as tough as a god, or a supernaturally endowed force, to stop bullying once it has been started. The best you can do is to get friends on your side who believe you - -and perhaps if those friends are even a little bit tough, they will support you during hard times.