Protecting yourself requires a certain set of skills. When you are born, you have your parents take care of you, nurture you, shelter you and nurse your wounds. Some of your close family may also shield you as you start growing up, say your sisters, brothers, uncles and friends.
As time passes on, if you have been brought up living in a shell, a highly protected one with security radars that are switched on 24 hours, you tend not to understand certain kinds of people and situations. The ones that call others names, degrade or try to run people down and such.
Slowly as you are released to the world, your outer shell giving away, it may certainly give you a positive jerk. Before you can get a foot hold of the ground, you will find yourself hurtled through galaxies of experiences far away from what you thought was home and no earth to support you.
By then it's usually way too late for the shell to cover you up again. Too much damage too soon. Resuscitation services yielding nothing.That's kind of what my situation was. And sometimes, still is. Though I think I have gone through a lot, I still know that I have much more to learn.
I used to keep telling my colleagues that when I was a child, I had nerves made of steel, I could not cry and I would not even if something was hurtful. Inside my shell, there were hurtful things happen to me too but the harm came from only the inside, never from the external world. But now that I have passed through years of torment, exposure and the external environment, as have you all, it's safe to say that I am eternally wounded.

With no coping skills or incapable comprehension levels, what was a 17 year old to do at the time.

Nothing much, I'd say. Just moved on from one experience to the next. But my visual memory of those teen years was particularly exceptional, almost par with photographic memory. So hurt and abuse would just stay impacted in my visual memory field for a very long time to come. Eventually, even more experiences positive and negative would overlap and take over the visual images of the previous ones.

As time passed, accumulation just dealt a severe blow to the immune system and one day, I collapsed. Physically, not even emotionally. I found myself in the emergency ward of a hospital and blacked out with regular intervals of time.
The doctors quickly scanned my X-rays and passed a diagnosis that was absurd to me, I'd never been that ill in my life.

Six months later, I had started to recover. Till then I was bed-ridden with a mind full of doubts. There was even one night, that I even thought that I was dying because I was unable to breathe. It was such a scary experience. And only I could help myself, if there was any way to be helped. I just did the only thing I could do. Deep breaths in and out, very slowly. It gave me time to think. It also broke me completely from the inside. Only because I was in bed with nothing else to do or create overlaps of the painful experiences I had till then. Everything kept repeating in my head.

Slowly, I started to become emotionally vulnerable, the tears that never appeared before made a guest appearance. More often than I needed it to be.
I am talking about something that happened a very long time ago. This is just a sequence of events that's leading to the living, breathing person that I am today.

After recovery, I started to search. Not for doctors or hospitals. But for meaning to life.
If you keep searching, they said you will reach some form of understanding. It's been many more years after and what I have learnt so far is the more you search, the more you dig a tunnel. It seems to be a blind tunnel because it's so dark and so expansive. Sometimes there are moments of light. But it's so easy to lose the light. People come in and make you stray far away from the path with their own experiences. I've learnt following someone else will not take me where I need to go. The path is always different.

Finally, after all of this what has helped me survive is acceptance. Not defeat, just acceptance helps you to overcome pain, hurt, losing love and also finding how beautiful life really is. A new day.
My mechanism of taking care of my sensitive nature now is to stay away from loud noises, loud people ,which also lead to removing childhood friends who were extremely nasty(even meant severing a 28 year old friendship), doing what I think I am capable of doing, pushing my limits to do somethings I think I can do, trying to eat natural food and getting a good night of sleep.

The thing about people you love is that sometimes they can get aggressive, they lose it, they sling mud all over you, they kick you and they throw you out of their lives forever. These are the ones that you need to be careful about because they are already in your heart. I have learnt that lesson the hard way. But life is very interesting and I have received so much love from strangers :) God bless their souls.

 I have my my own shell now. I do not need anyone else to support it or take care of it. I experience what I need to experience and I have started to build my own survival mechanism. I am happy, I work hard and I live a very good life. I feel taken care of. There is no recipe for survival as a highly sensitive person. You need to take care of your diet, your surroundings, check what's required and what's not, delete, re-use, get rid of the clutter and just get some rest. Also, a very important lesson, if there is one thing you get to take away from this post- No one can make you do anything YOU do not want to do.