Cassandra and the Canary

As the ancient city of Troy was falling, as war ravaged the general populace, there was a woman walking the stone corridors of the palace who could already see the end.

Her name was Cassandra.

She was a princess, the daughter of the ruling King and Queen, raised behind city walls once believed to be unbreakable. Troy had endured years of siege, hunger and attack. From the outside, the city still stood.

But Cassandra was not ordinary. She could sense what others could not.

In the myth, the god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy after falling in love with her. When she later refused his advances, Apollo did not take the gift away. Instead, he cursed her so that her visions would always be true, but no one would ever believe her.

So Cassandra lived in an absurd and brutal position. She saw the Greeks hiding inside the great wooden horse. She foresaw the gates opening. She knew the fires that would consume her home and the devastation that would follow. She warned those in command. She begged and pleaded for them to heed her.

She was dismissed.

To them, she was hysterical. Her prophecies were labelled dramatic, irrational, crazy. And in her own personal tragedy, she watched her city celebrate the gift of a wooden horse, the very thing that would destroy it.

I’m summarising, and Cassandra’s story is longer and more nuanced than I’m retelling here. But it has endured for thousands of years because it speaks to something deeper than prophecy. It is a story about sensing danger before it becomes obvious. About feeling decline before collapse. About carrying knowledge that others are not ready, willing or able to hold.

About being ignored.

For many Highly Sensitive People, this does not feel like mythology. It feels familiar.

If you are highly sensitive, like I am, you may recognise this pattern. You notice subtle shifts in mood and energy before they’re spoken. You sense when something in a system, a relationship or a culture is off long before language catches up. Your body reacts fiercely to overload, injustice or disconnection while others still appear comfortable, as though everything is normal.

Somewhere along the way, you were probably told that you are overreacting, that you think too much, that you need thicker skin, that you’re too sensitive. So, like Cassandra, you may have learned to doubt your own perception.

But what if your perception isn’t the problem?

Highly Sensitive People are not vulnerable versions of resilient humans. We are early warning systems. Our nervous systems process deeply and absorb nuance. We track patterns, detect relational tension, cultural drift and environmental stress that remain invisible to others. In evolutionary terms, this kind of attunement helped keep communities alive.

To use another metaphor, we are the canaries in the coal mine. Not because we are fragile, but because we respond early. We are sensitive to visible and invisible danger.

I live this duality every day.

I am an emergency manager, and I am highly sensitive.

My professional role is to look toward the horizon, to conceptualise risk, and to ask uncomfortable questions about infrastructure and vulnerability. But I do not only analyse emergency. As an HSP, I feel it. I feel the pressure drop before the storm. I sit in planning rooms holding data in one hand and human consequences in the other.

Flood maps are never just contoured lines to me. They are living rooms, floating photo albums, children’s toys strewn across roads. Power outages are not statistics, but elderly people in the dark or sweltering in heatwaves. Crop failure is not an agricultural metric. It is fear and famine.

That capacity to imagine impact is part training and part nervous system wiring. It’s all vocation.

It can be tiring. There is a particular fatigue that comes from seeing cracks in the foundation while others are reassured by fresh plaster. From knowing that what feels stable may simply not yet have been tested, or is built on shaky ground. From understanding that emergency rarely begins with the event itself, but much earlier, in inequality, in neglect, in the erosion of care and compassion.

Like many sensitive people, for a long time I experienced my sensitivity as a liability. Something to manage or hide away. Something that made not just the work, but life itself heavier.

But with time, I have come to understand that it is also the source of my capacity.

If I did not feel deeply, I would not notice early. If I did not notice early, I could not help prevent harm. And if I didn’t want to prevent harm, I wouldn’t care.

And if I don’t care, well, that’s another story.

What looks like fragility from the outside is often precision. It is fine attunement. It is the willingness to remain present with complexity instead of switching off. And yes, given the overwhelm, I often want to switch off. But I don’t.

Highly Sensitive People are not a design flaw. We are part of humanity’s protective architecture.

The problem is not sensitivity. The problem is a culture that devalues it. A culture that rewards speed over reflection, productivity over presence, and toughness over care.

Emergency work has clarified one truth for me: the most important relationship in the universe is the one we have with each other.

When societies treat sensitivity as an enemy, we eventually create collapse. We wall ourselves off. We push through warnings that say this is too much or this is not right. We disconnect from the very intelligence that evolved to keep us safe.

Cassandra was not wrong. The city simply refused to listen.

The canary isn’t weak. It’s stuck in a cage.

If we want different outcomes in our own lives and communities, we have to stop silencing those who detect danger early. We have to make space for listening, for slowness, for compassion.

Sensitivity is not madness. It is information. It is intelligence. It is orientation.

It is a map.

If you’re highly sensitive, this is your reminder that your nervous system is not malfunctioning. It’s communicating. Learning to listen to it may be one of the most important skills you ever develop. 

And if you recognise yourself in this story, perhaps you are not broken.

Perhaps you are early.

And maybe that’s not something to hide. Maybe it’s something we’re slowly learning how to honour.