I belong to a group of the most interesting people. We meet on Zoom a couple of times a month and I always leave our chats feeling excited and energised – that’s when I know I’m doing something which really resonates with me and I’m passionate about.

I was tested for intellectual ‘giftedness’ when I was a pre-school child. I’ve always had a brain which needs constant stimulation, gets bored easily and is thirsty to learn and grow.

I discovered I had the trait of High Sensitivity (aka sensory processing sensitivity) when I was 55, even though it’s a trait I was born with. I’d never heard of Highly Sensitive People before then and it was another part of the puzzle that is Me. It explains my very high empathy, my need for quiet spaces away from too much stimulatory input, my energy connection to nature, my intensity and my need for depth in relationships.

Following on from learning I am a HSP I discovered that my ability to feel physical pain in response to other people’s, and animal’s, physical pain wasn’t shared by everyone. As my Mum had the same ability it had always been normal in our house and we had no idea it wasn’t usual. This ability is called Somatic Empathy (also known in research literature as mirror-pain synaesthesia). Synaesthesia is currently found in about 4% of the population, but it usually takes the form of assigning colours to numbers, or colour or taste to musical notes. Mirror-touch & mirror-pain synaesthesia is only found in about 1.6% of the population.

I am also an Intuitive. I can often tell when animals are ill (I wish it worked with people but sadly not) even from great distances. I didn’t trust my intuition for most of my life because, to be honest, it kind’ve scared me and I had no idea where else it might lead if I ‘gave in’ to it. But now I’m older I have become excited by, not fearful, of it.

Then there are my other unusual experiences which don’t have a label. The fact that ‘ghosts’ seem drawn to me, and the fact that I was so connected to my last boyfriend I could sometimes tell when he experienced strong emotions or was thinking about me, even from hundreds of miles away. I knew almost from our first meeting that we had shared previous lives, though my ex thought it was fanciful nonsense until he paid to have a reading with a reputable Clairvoyant who confirmed it, even though she’d never met or spoken to me and was offered another of his relationships to compare ours to. These kinds of experiences aren’t well understood, but I expect are due to my ability to tune in to energy in fairly unique ways.

What has all this got to do with photography I hear you ask? Good question!

The above phenomena are often linked. Giftedness, for example, often goes hand in hand with the trait of High Sensitivity. Synaesthesia is also linked to Highly Sensitive people – in the case of my mirror-pain synaesthesia possibly due to very high empathy. ESP and paranormal encounters are linked to Intuition and the ability to connect to unseen energy forces. People with these gifts are said to have ‘thin boundaries’ to the world.

Nearly all the people I’ve come across who have some aspect of this constellation of gifts are creative. Artists, sculptors, writers, designers, musicians………creativity provides a way for us to express both our rich inner worlds and our often exaggerated experience of the outer world. I’ve long said that my creative photography has saved my sanity on more than one occasion and writing is my way of making sense of my deep and complex emotions.

I’ve written before about the fact that many highly creative people struggle with their mental health, although thankfully I’m not one of them. Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Isaac Newton, Michaelangelo, Beethoven and Charles Darwin all suffered from mental health issues and some of the aforementioned took their own lives. I do wonder if most very creatively gifted people have the trait of High Sensitivity and therefore high Empathy, which means they experience the world and themselves intensely and with often painful clarity and depth. I admit, the intensity with which I experience the world can be utterly overwhelming and the fact most other people don’t share my experience can be hugely isolating.

When I get my photo room finished I’m thinking of starting a podcast on YouTube about PSi and the correlation with high empathy, high sensitivity, synaesthesia, energy and intuition. There is only a very small amount of information available on these topics and it’s mostly from dry academics and is fairly unrelatable. I find the whole concept of psychic phenomena, consciousness and energy utterly fascinating and am so excited to learn how to open myself up more to the, as yet, little known. Watch this space!