Episode #15: Career Journeys, Motherhood, and Healing as a Highly Sensitive Person
How healing through high sensitivity can help us navigate deep-seated challenges and embrace our life’s purpose.
Welcome back to The Happy HSP Podcast. I’m your host Kimberly Marshall, and in today’s episode, I’m turning the microphone inward to share my own story as a highly sensitive person. From discovering I was an HSP at just 19 — to navigating motherhood, career burnout, and a deep healing and spiritual journey — I’ll be sharing many of the challenges I’ve faced with my sensitivity along with the growth I’ve experienced over the years.
If you’re an HSP who has struggled with your confidence and finding the strength to stand up for your needs in the workplace or relationships, then this episode is for you.
I hope you enjoy it!
All right guys, so this is going to be a different episode today because it’s episode number 15, which is my lucky number, and I wanted to take an episode to share my story and be part of this podcast, which is turning out to be so much more than I expected. I’m just meeting the most incredible people and learning about everyone’s stories has been really beautiful and has helped me grow in so many ways. And I hope you guys are finding that too, just kind of learning about all the different ways that we’re alike and all the different ways that we’re unique.
It’s just been just a beautiful journey for me, and I hope you’re enjoying it.
So today I wanted to share with you my story. So, this is going to be less of a conversation and more of just some time for me to kind of share with you my story, how I found out I was highly sensitive, and what that journey has looked like.
I found out when I was 19, which seems to be different than a lot of the highly sensitive people I’ve interviewed so far since. So many of us seem to find out later in life. But when I was 19 and a sophomore in college, I got pregnant with my daughter who’s now 22, and beautiful and amazing, my daughter Kylie. So that was just really hard as a highly sensitive teenager.
I spent so much time feeling different as a child. Thankfully my family really loved on me, and we didn’t have social media at the time, so even though school was difficult, feeling like I couldn’t fit in, I could go home and feel loved and kind of recover from all the kind of embarrassment of feeling different and feeling like I didn’t have many friends or wasn’t really able to connect with a lot of people.
That was when I was younger. And then in high school, I started coming out of my shell a little bit more. I went to really great school, a private school in Buffalo, and I had a lot of really great friends there who helped me see me for who I was. And I was working at the time at a grocery store, and I really loved any kind of job I had in my life that was service-based, I feel like was really rewarding for me. I always loved to help people out, even if it was at a grocery store, I don’t know why I would just even waitressing tables. That was just something I always enjoyed. I liked to making people happy, and I liked helping people out.
By the time I got to high school, and I was working and had more friendships, I started understanding myself and building confidence. And then when I got to college, I felt amazing. I was making a ton of friends and felt super confident, really loved who I was becoming, and then I ended up getting pregnant with my daughter.
That was a very difficult time in my life. I feel like I had just gotten to a point where I was starting to accept who I was, and it caused a rift in my family. And I want to be really cognizant about how I talk about this because I love my family dearly and I know that they love me too, and they wanted the best for me, and they did what they could and what felt right at the time. But to be honest, I needed support, and I needed love, and I needed to be told that everything was going to be okay because I was scared. I was very scared.
And instead of that, my family came down really hard on me and they were trying to take me to different doctors to find out what was wrong with me. I felt so loved as a child, and then all of a sudden it was, well, you’ve always been so emotional. There’s clearly something going on, and they thought I was suffering from mental illness.
During a very difficult point in my life, I felt like I didn’t have the support of my family, and I felt very judged. Thankfully, I had enough confidence in myself at that time to kind of know, I know there’s not something wrong with me, there’s something different about me, but I didn’t yet know what that was.
I got a coffee and I went to the bookstore, and I really just needed to get out of the house and kind of put my thoughts together because as highly sensitive people we’re constantly processing, and especially something as big as a pregnancy in your teenage years, that comes with a lot of thinking. So, I went to the store and many of the HSPs find out I found Dr. Elaine Aron’s book, and this was pretty much about five or six years after she had first published it, 2000 and 2002. Yeah.
So yeah, it was such a relief. Again, I flipped to the quiz on the back of the book or on the inside, I can’t remember where it was, and I took the quiz and I was just like, yes, this is me. This is me. And just such a relief that no, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not sick, I’m not ill. This is just who I am. So, it kind of started my journey.
I ended up marrying my daughter’s dad, and we were together for a really long time, for about over 20 years, and happily married, thankfully for the first few decades, happily together. But it was just a journey is how I can explain it. I’m starting to see different themes that have been coming up in my life, a lot of them in and around being able to stand up for my own needs.
And I think it’s something a lot of us struggle with. We are so empathic, and we care so much about other people, and we care about doing the right thing. And a lot of the messages that I got in my journey with my pregnancy was I had done something wrong. I had done something bad, and I had to kind of make amends and do better.
I feel like that’s when my overachieving kind of kicked in. It’s funny. In school, I always felt smart. My teachers loved me and always said that I was extremely smart and intelligent, and I always did well and got great grades. And then I had Kylie. I had to drop out of college and kind of rethink my schooling. I had gone to school at Oswego for meteorology and photography, and then when I decided, when me and John, my husband, when we decided to make things work and see what we could do and have Kylie and raise her together, I had to move from Buffalo to the East Coast (he was in the Hudson Valley) and kind of start all over.
When she was three, I ended up working two jobs and going to school full-time because I wanted to go back to school and finish my degree. So yes, I was a waitress for a little while. I worked for a really cool place called Thornwillow Press where we published original short stories by John Updike and Walter Cronkite. The business owner there was really interesting, and he’s still working and doing incredible things in the book industry. But I ended up going back to school for English and Media studies because I realized I wanted to do my original dream, which was be a writer and editor.
I went there and I worked a lot and ended up getting a job at Time Inc, which I was really excited about. So here I am, all excited to be a writer and editor, and I landed a book production job, which awesome. I got to work on some really cool titles from Cooking Light and Real Simple and Time Magazine and Life, and I was really proud of the work that I did there.
But that’s where I really started to understand that my difference, my high sensitivity, made it really hard to fit into a corporate work environment. Now, at first, the idea that I had is that there was something wrong with me. Why couldn’t I speak up in meetings? Everyone on the team seemed to really get along really well, and I always felt like I just didn’t fit in socially in the workplace. But the one thing I really struggled with there was getting along with my team, there was just something different about me and I couldn’t really put my finger on it, even though I knew I was a highly sensitive person, I don’t think I realized that the struggles I was experiencing were because of my high sensitivity.
I really just thought that I didn’t fit in and that I wasn’t good enough. Which is so funny because when I look back on it, there’s so many things that highly sensitive people don’t do well that I was trying to fit myself into, and it wasn’t a good fit, and I wish I had known that. But I guess that’s the point is we live and we learn.
It was a lot of repetitive work. I had to set up press schedules, I had to order paper, I had to talk to salespeople, very regimented and the same thing. It didn’t really need a lot of thinking. It didn’t really require me to think complexly about anything. And I just had this sense, I want to be a writer, I want to be a writer, I want to be an editor. I want to get into that world.
I was really stuck. And the commute was tough. It was two hours in, two hours home. Plus, I had a three-year-old daughter. So, I’m sure you can imagine with high sensitivity, that was a lot on my nervous system, but I powered through and ended up burning out, as a lot of us do when we’re in the wrong place, when we’re in the wrong environment for too long.
And it’s funny, I was mentioning how sometimes we have trouble because of our empathy standing up for our own needs. We have this kind of need to want to make other people feel comfortable and good, and I feel like that comes from our need, our social needs. We can feel so different. So, for the longest time, I would try and fit myself into the box and be more corporate and be more cutthroat, and it just didn’t sit well with me.
Toward the end of my six years at time, I decided to talk to HR. It took a lot of hype to get myself in a place where I felt comfortable going to HR with this issue, and I basically said, look, I’m not comfortable on my team. I know there’s more work that I want to do here. I’m really interested in the copy editing and the writing aspect.
And they were really honest with me. They’re like, look, we hire the best of the best. And at the time I was going for a copy-editing certification, but it kind of showed initiative like, look, I’m learning the skills. This is what I’m really interested in. I don’t feel comfortable talking to any of my managers about this dream because they were giving me a hard time about when I was raising my hand and kind of interested in exploring different departments and they were really hard on me about that.
Again, it was the sense that I wasn’t being loyal, but I deserved, and I’m glad I came to this conclusion I deserved as a professional to explore different avenues to explore different roles. So yeah, finally I decided to just kind of raise my hand in that direction anyway, and HR was amazing. They were like, look, this is going to be hard, but we have an opening for Departures magazine. Would you be interested? So eventually they were able to help me.
By that time, I had already secured some work freelancing from home, and I was so burned out from the commute and being on the wrong team and being in the wrong environment. So, I just decided to jump ship and work for myself for a little while. So that led me to freelancing and content marketing, which was interesting because here I wanted to be a writer, and I was finally writing and editing what I wanted to do, but then I started to realize that the subject matter I was working on wasn’t right for me.
And it’s funny, at first I was like, gosh, am I ever going to find anything that I do? Because at that point, I had tried a million different things. I even tried an herbal shop on Etsy, and I was like, maybe I want to do dried flowers or that I was trying writing, and I was just trying all these things. And honestly, it takes a lot of energy to learn the skills, try the thing, and to realize that you’re not happy there anyway.
But again, one of the things about highly sensitive people is that the work that we do really has to speak to us. It really has to capture our attention and our imagination and our hearts. And when we’re in jobs that we don’t love wholly and completely, our brains just don’t want to, they don’t want to think about it, they don’t want to explore.
They’re constantly looking for that next step that will satisfy this itch maybe is what I call it. So, I did that for a little while in my writing career. I worked for companies and content marketing, and I wrote blog articles for a technology company. I wrote blog articles for a Solo Mom magazine, which I actually loved that work. That meant a lot to me. I did enjoy that one. It was interesting. I also ended up at a content marketing company that taught content marketing and coaching, which was interesting to me.
So, this is the company where I started writing about the coaching process. And I found it fascinating because I had the idea that coaching was more mentorship, and at the time, I didn’t really know the difference between coaching and mentorship, but mentorship is when you’ve, you’ve succeeded at a certain level and you are helping someone who wants to get to where you are by offering them advice, showing them the ropes, telling them what you did, kind of helping lessen that journey. But with coaching, it’s really about being present with someone with your client and asking them the questions that they need to think about in order to make progress. So, it was fascinating to me because you don’t have to be an expert in anything to be a great coach. You just have to know how to be curious and ask the right questions. You’re really a thinking partner.
I was writing about the process and I was writing about coaching, and I was like, this is really interesting to me, but I don’t think I knew I wanted to try coaching and I wanted to get my certification through the ICF, which I’m currently securing my ACC with the ICF, but I didn’t know how I wanted to apply it. I did not want to apply it in marketing. By that time, I kind of knew that marketing wasn’t really the field for me. I sat down and I got really honest with myself. I’m like, Kim, you know what? You’ve tried a million things in your career. You have to know at least a little bit of something about what gives you more purpose, what brings you joy?
What can you do that is of service with this coaching? And what would really light me up? I asked myself that question and it came back to my own struggles in life, which was my high sensitivity, my career journey, learning to find my voice, learning to find my confidence, learning to stand up for my needs. So that’s where Happy HSP was really born. And it’s funny, I started it a few years ago, maybe three years ago, but I really hadn’t had the energy to really dive into it. I’m grateful that I have been kind of building the bones of it for the past few years, but personally, I’ve been going through a lot in my life.
I’d say maybe in the span of three or four years, I had lost my father-in-law and a bunch of men on my husband’s side of the family, which was tough. And at that time, we were also selling our house, selling my mother-in-law’s house. And for anyone who has moved, that can be all the packing and the shifting, and we have a ton of animals. It was just chaos for the longest time. And then when we bought our house in New Jersey, my mom was sick and she was dying, so I was going down there and trying to help care for her. At the time, I was also going for my ICF certification, and I was working for Monster.com, I believe, writing about careers, writing about hiring and that kind of thing.
It was another time in my life where just all this stuff was going on, and at that time, my ex-husband and I, our relationship started to really break down. So that brings me really to this January, I moved home to Buffalo to spend some time with my family and my dad ended up passing away.
I just have to say that I don’t mean to sound like a victim, and I’m definitely not. I truly believe that all of us are here to grow and to learn, and I also believe that we grow and we learn the most through the difficult times in our lives. And I know there’s a reason for all of it. I like to think that it’s so I can hold space for others. I feel like when you’ve been through so much, it’s easier to have more empathy.
This year has, yeah, it’s just been a journey and Happy HSP has been the best outlet for me, just the best, especially this project, this is really the first one I’ve started and really jumped into since January.
I have been healing. I’ve been doing a lot of healing. It’s never easy to leave a 20-plus-year relationship. You’re kind of finding out who you are all over again, and it’s been tough and it’s been beautiful all at once.
I’ve been on a deeply spiritual journey, which I was not expecting or searching for, but that’s also been beautiful, beautiful. I cannot tell you how much growth I’ve done spiritually without even realizing it or searching for it. It just kind of fell in my lap. And if you’ve listened to some of the other episodes, you’ll see there are so many highly sensitive people going through this right now. I’m in the camp that believes that there’s something really spiritual going on in the world, and we need more love and more empathy, and more people are realizing that it’s all tied together, all this energy and need for love and laying aside all the hate and the negativity.
I’ve definitely seen a lot this year through my spiritual journey, meditations, readings and experiences that definitely show me that we’re not alone, which is such a beautiful concept. We all have spirit guides and spirit teams, and we all have help. And there’s just been a lot in my life that has shown me that this year and how to work with it, which has been fascinating and helpful for me.
But yeah, so it’s really brought me to now I’m finally feeling my energy coming back. I’m so happy I’ve been doing this podcast. I’ve been just exploring things and learning so much and just feeling my energy coming back. I just feel like everything that I’ve been through in my life has come together in a way that I can help other highly sensitive people kind of see the beauty in things and the hope. There’s so much hope. Even when things feel hopeless, there’s always something you can do to kind of turn things around, even if it’s one step at a time. So that’s where I’m at and that’s why my coaching practice means so much to me.
I truly believe that highly sensitive people have so much talent and intelligence, and with our deep understanding and our ability to really think things through and come up with beautiful solutions, we’re so needed.
I feel like the work that I do is not only helping people stand in their own power and find their voice, I have needed to find that confidence to be like, “Hey, this doesn’t work for me. This is the type of environment I thrive in. This is the type of work I want to do.” And support them in that transition is very rewarding for me because I know how it feels to be so stuck in that place of hating your job. And that’s where we spend most of our time, and it really affects us even after we clock out. You want to love the work that you do.
You want it to fill you with pride. You want it to fill you with purpose and joy. So yeah, it’s funny. I feel like every single job I’ve had, every single role I’ve played has kind of led to this one thing that encompasses all of it. So, it’s been a really beautiful outlet for me.
One thing I struggle with when it comes to my sensitivity is voicing my needs. I have always wanted to make other people feel comfortable, and I have always wanted to be doing the right thing, “right thing,” although I’m learning there really is no right and wrong only perspective. And really the most important thing is how your decisions make you feel on a personal level, not how they look to everyone else, which is so hard to disconnect yourself from, but important to do as well. But how it makes you feel and how you feel making that choice and whether or not it brings you happiness.
Voicing my needs has always been very tough for me, but I’m getting so much better at it. And I think the thing that has helped me the most there is learning how to do it in a way that’s loving, especially in relationships, close relationships. That’s been so hard because not all relationships in my life work for me. And I’ve always been the kind of person that will just go, just go and just stop being so much of a Debbie Downer and enjoy yourself and be kind. And what ends up always happening with me is that am constantly making space for others. And there are a few people in my life who’ve been able to really, really see and understand and make space for me.
I’m just at a point in my life where I want more friendships and relationships that see me fully, understand me fully and love all parts of me, get all parts of me, allow me to be more of myself. I feel like for the longest time in everything at work in my relationships, I’ve kind of hidden a part of myself to fit in. But yeah, I’ve just learned that that doesn’t do much for me, my happiness.
It’s so important to be able to stand up for your own needs in a way that feels good to you. And I’ve always spent a lot of energy trying to make others feel safe and trying to figure out what they were thinking. And I’ve learned how to kind of take that and put it into myself, which has been huge. This year has been really transformational. I committed to myself in the beginning of the year that I was not going to say yes to anything that I didn’t want to do really, really, really badly. And I was just going to focus on myself and my healing and building my next chapter.
And I gave myself permission to focus on me for a change. And yeah, I’m just really, really glad I did that. And I encourage any of you who are struggling in that way to give yourself that permission. It’s so important so that you can be a better mom, you can be a better friend. You do have the energy in your work. Sometimes we have to be a little bit selfish there, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.
One of the things I love about my high sensitivity, there’s so much I love about it. Gosh, especially talking to other highly sensitive people. Obviously, the depth of processing is really beautiful, though. That can get tiring.
But I just love how, I love how I can hold space for others without judgment. That has been a journey. I really do feel like I grew up in a very judgmental family that if you didn’t do the right things all the time, you were just an awful person. And to grow up and see how that harms people and to realize that we are all the same, all of us are capable of whatever anybody else is capable of, and that there are reasons why people do the things that they do. Even the most awful things. You look at people that really hurt people, they’re hurting too. So, it’s just this concept of we’re all the same. We’re all human, we’re all on our own journeys. And just kind of realizing that kind of gives people the space to feel safe. And I feel like that’s needed more because that’s where the real healing begins.
Otherwise, we’re just laying on the shame, whether it’s on ourselves or on others. And there’s no reason to ever have shame. There’s nothing that you can do as a human being that is shameful. It’s all in the lesson. That’s the most important part.
If you’re highly sensitive person and you’re struggling finding joy in your life, I would say the thing that’s helped me most is stop blaming yourself. Stop being so hard on yourself and get curious. If something is coming up for you that’s really hurtful or hard, maybe ask yourself, what is this teaching me? How can I turn this into something positive? What can I learn from this and how can I use that in a better way moving forward?
We are never done growing. I truly believe that. That is why we are here to learn the hard lessons and grow. So, the lessons that you’re getting, the hard things that are happening in your life, there’s growth there for you. And it is all for something so much bigger than us and something good. There’s something that is good that can come out of everybody.
And if you’re struggling socially, as I have, try and reach out to other highly sensitive people. I know it can be hard for us to socialize, and we only have so much energy, but there are so many HSPs out there that A, are looking for the same kind of connection. But B, we’re just such empathetic and loving people. So, you’re never alone. You’re never alone in this.
Not only spiritually because we all have our spirit teams and support there, but in human form to highly sensitive people are such good people, and we know how to go deep and build those genuine connections.
So yeah, just one step at a time, go easy on yourself. Make sure you’re standing up for your needs and figuring out a way that you can do it that feels good for you, because your needs are just as important as everybody else’s. And in fact, they’re the utmost importance to yourself.
What am I up to? I am building Happy HSP. I have three different projects. One is Happy HSP Coaching, that is career coaching. And I help highly sensitive people build more nurturing and gentle careers that are more suited for our temperament, specifically ones that bring lots of purpose, meaning, and joy. You can go to my website, it’s happyhspcoaching.com. I have some downloads there that you can download for free. I have a Career Clarity Guidebook that can help you really think about your values and what gives you purpose and meaning in your life, and think about your career in terms of that. And you can also download the Stress Less Toolkit, which is new. I’m so excited about it. One of the biggest things for us is settling our nervous systems and feeling safe, and that’s when we can do our best work and really conserve our energy.
You can download the Stress Less Toolkit. It’s pretty much downloadable where it’s like everything you need to really calm your nervous system, like what to do in the moment if you’re feeling overwhelmed to breathing exercises. It’s a really great resource. I’m really excited about it.
And you can also, on my website, sign up for a free Career Clarity Breakthrough session with me. It’s a 30 minute session where we talk about your challenges at work and think about what next steps you can take, and if there are resources I can share with you to help get you in the right direction and take out that frustration, because I know how scary it can be to take that next step, especially when you’re not sure what it is. Especially as HSPs, we overthink everything and we could drive ourselves crazy!
I also have a waiting list for my Career Transformation Program, and that’s a six-week program I’m really excited about. And that is half one-on-one coaching and half group coaching. And in the group coaching, we’ll have a lesson and talk about it, and you’ll meet other HSPs who are in your shoes, who are struggling in their careers, and who are basically going through what you are, so you have a chance to connect with them and share your journey and see what’s working for them.
So, it’s a great community-building thing, and there’s a curriculum, so half of it is learning and half of it is exploring through coaching.
I also have my podcast, The Happy HSP Podcast, which you’re listening to now, which has been just incredible. One thing I would like to share is that I have had a lot of coaches and HSP experts on the podcast, but I would also love to open the door for other people who have stories to share.
My thought about this podcast was less to be more experts and more stories of HSPs in general. I love all the expert knowledge that we’ve had so far, and there’s way more to come. I’m so excited to publish a lot of the episodes that I’ve already recorded, and I have more people that I’m interviewing soon. But also, I want to encourage anyone who’s maybe not in the profession or not an expert, but it’s less about that and more about experience. And I really wanted this to be a place where highly sensitive people could share their stories from any walk of life.
So, if that’s something you were not reaching out to me or signing up for because you thought you had to be a professional in this industry, I just want to make sure that that’s not the case. So, reach out, I’ll you the questions in advance and we’ll discuss if you’re a good fit.
I’d love to open that door.
And then last thing I’m working on is I have an Instagram account called Happy HSP Living, and it’s really just a place for me to be more creative. When I worked for time, a lot of the home decor magazines that we published, like Southern Living and Real Simple. I just loved that creative space of cozy spaces and cooking, and I just find so much comfort in home and environment. So that account is really just kind of a reminder to find joy in the little things. So yeah, that one is about living gently as a highly sensitive person.
If you could use a little more of that kind of the gentleness, then you can follow me on Instagram that’s Happy HSP Living.
And I think that’s pretty much it for me. You can follow me on all my Instagram accounts, happy HSP coaching, happy HSP podcast, happy HSP living. I would love to hear about your journey or how you’re enjoying these episodes, so feel free to reach out. So that’s my story, and I can’t wait to share with you all the episodes to come.
There are just so many more incredible people that I got to interview, and I have signed up and so much more to come, and I’m so grateful to share this journey with you, so thank you for listening.
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About Kimberly:
Kimberly Marshall is a career coach for highly sensitive people (HSPs) and host of The Happy HSP Podcast. After 20 years in the publishing industry working for companies like Time Inc., Monster.com, and W. W. Norton, she left her corporate career to pursue work that better suited her HSP needs. She now helps HSPs overcome burnout and low confidence in the workplace and create gentle and nurturing careers that bring them lots of purpose, meaning, and joy.
Through her work and creative ventures, Kimberly hopes to shed more light on the reality of living with high sensitivity and inspire more HSPs to embrace their empathetic, loving, and gentle natures.
Hosted/produced by Kimberly Marshall
Edited by Fonzie Try Media
Artwork by Tara Corola