Hi there.

For as far back as I can remember, the story of my life has been you name it, I’m sensitive to it. It started out with simple things like the kids at nursery school who were bigger than me making me cry and the fluorescent lights in my high school and college classrooms and post-grad nine-to-five office jobs provoking mind-numbing headaches. 

Over the years, those few identifiable triggers (mean people, bright lights) have morphed into a perplexing mass of environmental, social, and food-related culprits: the whirring of a computer, strong perfumes and odors, harsh words, all types of chemical additives and preservatives, certain foods (like dairy and wheat gluten), loud noises, and the most frustrating by far, the sun. My reactions to these stimuli range from the aforementioned searing headaches to strange rashes and full-out emotional breakdowns, but as a whole, they confirm what people have been telling me for years, whether it be doctors, friends, family, or boyfriends; I am sensitive—too sensitive.

But rather than sit silently in my room, staring into my lap and playing with my thumbs, as I did in nursery school, I’ve decided to start a blog—a sensitivity blog, if you will. Because really, I’m tired of being told to toughen up. We are such fragile creatures, after all, each of us with our own set of unique struggles and subsequent insights.

You see, I’ve wanted to become an official blogger for quite some time, but I haven’t been able to figure out what, exactly, to write about. My mind whirls from place to place and topic to topic so haphazardly that I often cannot keep up with it (silly brain). But I’m happy to say that I have finally managed to focus my various passions and personality quirks into one blog-worthy space (I hope):  Sweet Sensitivity.

The spark for this revolutionary idea was ignited as I stood in my kitchen one day, savoring the rich, velvety sweetness of a Pamela’s Dark Chocolate, Chocolate Chunk Cookie—my medicinal cookies, as I’ve come to call them. Not only will one bite of these chocolicious treats transport you to a land of magical sensory experience, but they also happen to be made sans gluten, wheat, and dairy—three things that, for my delicate digestive tract, have become intolerable. This does not make them a health food, of course; a cookie is a cookie, whether it contains 89% organic ingredients or not! But it does make them a safe indulgence for a highly sensitive, food-allergy-plagued individual such as myself.

The older I get, the more I embrace who I am—flaws and all. And part of what I’ve grown to appreciate is the new places to which my “heightened sensitivity” has taken me—foods I would never have tried, truths I would never have uncovered, friends I would never have met, and words—whether on the page or in a song—I would never have written. Sensitivity, for me, is a blessing. It is beautiful, and it is sweet. Just like those damn cookies.

I eat at least one a day, by the way (on average). Yum.