Different personality styles to deal with sensitivity
The photo is Christina Ricci as Wednesday in Addams Family Values (1993), which also featured David Krumholtz [now in the tv series Numb3rs] as a rather stereotypical highly sensitive kid, repressed and using an inhaler to cope with asthma.
But Wednesday may represent another sort of coping with high sensitivity: responding to situations and other people with snide irony and contemptuousness. That may be another way to cover or hide from feelings that seem too strong.
In her book My Teeming Brain: Understanding Creative Writers, Jane Piirto, PhD quotes a writer remembering their childhood, with thoughts that Wednesday might have shared: “What I feel as I think of summer camp is completely ugly. I want to kill my parents for doing this to me! I want to hack them to death for this… they threw me away and tried to make me ordinary! They threw me away with a bunch of normal kids who thought I was strange and made me feel strange until I became strange!”
Dr. Piirto goes on to comment, “This quotation illustrates the combination of high intelligence.. and high emotionality.. that are hallmarks of the personality of the creative writer.”
Also see her related article: Themes in the Lives of Successful U.S. Adult Creative Writers
This intensity of emotional memory is something Elizabeth Wurtzel spoke about in her memoir Prozac Nation: “No one will understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them.”
