A hamster made me rethink mental health, and sent me into an emotional meltdown.

I saw a post on Facebook about a hamster called Fluffy, who had suffered a traumatic experience. The poor little guy had escaped from his cage while travelling in his owner’s car, and scampered into the dashboard. This resulted in the owner going through what can only be described as “a comedy of errors and vehicle repairers” to try and retrieve her beloved pet. Fluffy had snuck out to eat food left for him in the car (evidenced by a well-nibbled carrot, left for Fluffy overnight by a panel beater), but no one was able to put their hands on the little guy. Eventually, using a humane mousetrap, he was caught and sent home, but only after spending three whole days navigating the interior of a car.

Fluffy had survived this experience, and had escaped without any injuries, or serious health effects. But the owner’s reason for posting his misadventure was that a month later, he was still not himself. The owner was pleading for advice on how to make him happy again. Fluffy, after everything he’d been through, was not the same happy hamster he had been before his dashboard experience. He had not suffered physical pain – he’d suffered emotional and mental pain. A pain so big and weighty, he was carrying it a month later, with no signs of improvement. He was miserable, and his distressed owner had no idea how to help him.

The hamster was distressed. The owner was distressed. And I’ll tell you something else – it made me distressed.

My ideas on mental health were thrown wide open by a tiny little ball of fluff. An animal who many would say is too low on the food chain to experience complex emotions, let alone be traumatised by something which had essentially not caused him any physical harm.

Questions boiled in my head. What did Fluffy’s suffering say about assumptions we make about how deeply animals feel? How badly have we been undervaluing life on this planet? Do we take for granted how deeply our furry pet companions feel, and have I been causing undue trauma to my cat? What does this all say about traumatic experiences in humans? Have I been conscious enough of how I treat others?

More than that, the hamster’s anguish hit me in an emotional way I had not expected. It reduced me to tears, and not just discreet little weepy tears, but big, fat, ugly, miserable ones. Like a James Bond martini, I was truly shaken.

Some people in the comments section of Fluffy’s post thought it was a funny story (or a stupid one) but I thought it was the saddest thing in existence. For me, it had profound implications about the precarious nature of mental health, and it rocked me emotionally. But I had no idea of what to make of the whirlwind of feelings and thoughts which had cropped up in my head. Was it me? Was I taking this story about a hamster too far? And if so, what did that say about my mental health?

But, as always, Dabrowski has answers. It seemed that in my horror of reading about Fluffy, I had quite forgotten what I had learned about the nature of overexcitability. In Personality-Shaping Through Positive Disintegration (1967), Dabrowski tells us…

“It consists in an unproportional reaction to a stimulus, an extended, long-lasting, accelerated reaction, and a peculiar reaction to a neutral stimulus. This hyperexcitability is therefore a strong, uncommon sensitivity to external and internal stimuli.”

Dabrowski (1967)

An unproportional reaction. A peculiar reaction. An uncommon sensitivity.

I was just experiencing life in a way that was not common to other people. Empathy (which I have been working on through subject-object thinking) and sadness would have been normal reactions. But turn up the volume on those emotions, make them unproportional, peculiar and uncommonly sensitive, and this was explaining exactly what I was feeling about Fluffy. 

I wasn’t going mental. My strong reaction to Fluffy’s plight did not make me crazy.

It may be difficult for people without overexcitabilities to comprehend how gripping and overwhelming they can be. How emotions over an animal who is not your own pet, can threaten to bring you to your knees. Not just make you a little bit sad, but almost destroy you entirely. It isn’t common for people without overexcitability to have such devastating reactions. 

There are days when I forget this. Days when I forget that I’m a little bit different in how I think, feel and see the world. It’s easy to forget, because we only have our own perspective to go from. We can’t be inside the minds of others. I really can’t imaging living my life any other way. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t want to live any other way.

Because for me, to live without the crushing weight of a hamster’s plight, is also to live without levels of compassion and empathy so great, that I barely understand them, and which threaten to bring down my world. To live without having my heart and mind irrevocably expanded by a random Facebook post about a rodent. To live without regular tears of overwhelming joy, fierce attachments to those I love, and sweeping expanses of relief. 

In light of this, I need to understand that when I’m looking at my own mental health, I may need to do it on different terms. If I don’t experience the world in the same way as everyone else, I need to learn to evaluate it in a different way too. If part of my personality ideal is to retain these strong emotions, and celebrate them, then I need to view my emotional meltdowns in those terms. In Positive Disintegration (1964), Dabrowski says…

“In assessing the mental health of outstanding persons one should apply individual, almost unique, personality norms, for the course of their development must be evaluated in terms of their own personality ideals.”

Dabrowski 1964

I’m thankful for Fluffy’s beautiful lesson in empathy. Yes, you read right – I’m glad a hamster made me have a meltdown, because I’ve learned so much from it. The key thing that I’ve learnt is that while this experience may not be normal for everyone, they are normal for me.

So, I think I’ll do what I always do on this blog – tell other people about my story. In sharing, perhaps I can remind people with overexcitability that it is ok to feel this way. That they are not going crazy. I can tell them that it doesn’t matter where the deep feelings come from, as long as there is a chance to learn, grow and expand their hearts. I can possibly give them hope these deep emotions can lead somewhere good.

One thing I can definitely do – I can assure you that if you ever feel a huge amount of unexpected emotional turmoil, even if it’s over a hamster, you are most certainly not alone.