“All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it.”

As highly sensitive people who grow up feeling like outsiders, looking-in, we can often spend years looking outside ourselves for love and approval. If we can only achieve what we’ve been told is important — whether it’s fame or money or awards — we can fill the empty hole that is inside us.

But then, we get it, and it doesn’t.

This quote by the writer Kazuo Ishiguro from his book When We Were Orphans really resonated with how I have been feeling:

“All I know is that I’ve w...