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On Being Black, Female, and An HSP Empath In the Time of Coronavirus

It has been challenging, but I’m doing my best to survive and hopefully thrive.

Patrice Walker
7 min readJul 18, 2020
Photo by Nechirwan Kavian on Unsplash

As a highly sensitive person (HSP) and empath who is also a Black woman, if I didn’t strive to look at what’s going on in the world today from a “higher” or expanded perspective, I’d be a “basket case” by now.

That’s probably not a very PC term to use in this day and age, but I’m a baby boomer so I remember hearing and using it growing up in the sleepy, segregated town of Washington DC in the 50's and 60's.

The term, basket case, originated during World War I when soldiers lost their arms and legs in battle and were carried off the field in a basket! Today, it’s used metaphorically to indicate someone who is rendered “powerless and ineffective by nerves, stress, panic, or exhaustion,” according to Wiktionary.

If that definition doesn’t sound like a frazzled HSP and describe how I often feel these days, I don’t know what does!

Hard to watch

Like many HSP empaths, regardless of race, watching the murder of George Floyd on television is extremely difficult, if not impossible. And there’s a new video being repeatedly aired on the news about a Latino man who was killed…

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Patrice Walker
Patrice Walker

Written by Patrice Walker

I'm a Boomer who loves to write, crochet, explore metaphysics, & walk the beaches of O'ahu. Paywall-free links to my stories at https://ko-fi.com/patricewalker

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