I was startled, this week, with a question about sensitivity. A close friend, mid-crisis, mid-life, up past mid-night, asked a few staccato questions with more directness than I expected: Am I too sensitive? Do I let the world influence me too much? Do you think I’m too fragile? How you respond in these moments usually demands some thought. Unfortunately, these moments also usually arrive when your body is underslept and your mind is overactive, the presence of drink not always a trigger for empathy and insight.
Implicit in these questions, I believe, is the notion of an ideal state. A sense of perfection that can be achieved. A poise that is the consequence of effort. Presenting just the right amount of softness, just the right amount of hardness, is a skill that can be refined, as goes this belief. To be a virtuoso of sensitivity, you wear a carapace that protects your most delicate parts: a little armor for your professional life, an even stronger breastplate for whenever you’re betrayed by a lover, but always with slits in the face shield, too, so that you can occasionally reveal a smile.
Although I suspect that there’s something mistaken in these assumptions. Or at least something misleading, because it implies an ability to shift perceptions, to consciously adjust the antennae that bring the world closer. Even though sensitivity might in fact be a dial, with some people more squishy and other people more sturdy, I doubt that you have the ability to control where you land on the spectrum. Perhaps you can understand. Perhaps you can cope. Perhaps you can even adapt. But my first impression is that you can’t transform. The person who tries to be less sensitive probably ends up suppressing actual sensations, while the person who tries to be more sensitive probably ends up conjuring insincere sensations, and I’m not exactly sure which outcome is worse.
Failing in either direction comes with obvious risks: either your life is too vulnerable and every flippant remark feels like a judgement on your character, or your life is too protected and you miss opportunities for connection. Basically, you’ll be hugging every murderer who comes around the corner in the former and you’ll be overlooking all the people who care for you in the latter. Which doesn’t mean that you don’t want to improve, or that there aren’t better and worse ways to proceed. But the question isn’t really whether you can calibrate your sensitivities, as you don’t have that omniscience. You don’t get to refine your feelings with such exactitude. The more pertinent, realistic, and even measurable question in life is always the same: because you must choose one risk, which mistake would you rather make?
In an unfamiliar city, you might be startled by the incessant car horns, the strange crowds, the confusion of the sidewalks, and you might feel anxious, fidgety, even paralyzed in front of the unknown sights, swinging your head left and right like a cat trapped in a bird sanctuary. Or you might observe those crowds and glance past shop windows without any tension, without any particular fixation, with a diffuse, expansive gaze rather than a piercing stare. The troublesome question is whether the former or the latter is the result of more sensitivity. Does the person who notices more detail have more of an edgy, vulnerable reaction? Or is it the reverse? The answer is almost certainly a little bit of both.
What happens, it seems, is that your inclination simply amplifies, it redounds, it triggers a cascade of effects, so that what you perceive in your surroundings is influenced by how you interpret those surroundings, which is a little disturbing the more you consider it. A violinist probably can’t walk down the street without hearing a symphony, just as an oversensitive person, a person hostage to the next emotion, probably can’t walk down the street without feeling nothing but judgmental eyes. Even though you never really know what you’re seeking, you’ll always—eventually, inadvertently, unavoidably—find it.
Yet I am beginning to notice an artificial, and probably false, divide in these paragraphs. My thoughts have been too limited—I have somehow isolated the entire subject of sensitivity to something that’s akin to social fragility. How susceptible a person is to slights, opinions, and insults has been my only measurement, even though that does, now that I consider it, seem woefully incomplete. Because there’s sensitivity, too, in a palate that recognizes the sweetness of strawberries, in an ear that discerns the highest of violin notes, in an eye that’s proficient in spotting, on the sea, the slightest flaps in a sail. And to disentangle how much a snide word affects your mood from how much these more tangible sensations affect you is a little tricky.
I am inclined to believe that there’s a correlation, as the person who discerns the nuances of spice on their tongue is, perhaps, the person most primed to notice other sensations. Of course there are imbalances. Some experts, surely, ignore much of life while perfecting just one sense—the virtuoso musician who can’t engage in conversation, the chef with a delicate and practiced touch in everything but personal relationships. But I doubt that the average person can only partially expose their nerves, adding nuance and care and discernment in just one aspect of life. The average person, unmasked and exhibited in public, in a way that’s so necessary for connection, does face the potential of wounds. At least this seems to be a reasonable compromise: a greater appreciation of spring flowers, a greater attentiveness in conversation, a greater insight into relationships, and, therefore, more vulnerability to harm. And if there is a correlation between sensitivities—which I do suspect—then sommeliers must live incredibly dramatic lives.
Obviously it is still possible to discern the textures of a room, to have a nuanced comprehension of moods and atmosphere, while putting a gap between those perceptions and your reactions. The most gentle and thoughtful conversationalists seems to glide through the world in this manner, at an oblique angle, peering into conversations from a distance, still generous, still warm, but not hostage to every emotional whim.
And if you do possess this amount of dexterity you might notice that the world contains a surplus of pain. I don’t think it matters, in the end, whether this pain redounds from fragility—since wounds don’t require an explanation to provoke pain. You don’t have to look too closely, or talk to the typical person for too long, to spot the signs. It is present in the postures, in the tightened jaws and shoulders, in the loose, offhand words spoken at a mumble. Most people need just a little push, a sensitive ear, a willing listener, before it begins to pour, all the years of pain that are held so tight.
If you attempt to ask more questions than you’re asked, it won’t take long at all to hear that most common phrase, the phrase that those with sensitive discernments are accustomed to hearing: I’ve never told this to anyone. Out come the secrets, the embarrassments, the shame, the regrets, all the memories that have been spoken thousands and thousand of times before but never once aloud—these are the memories that you can see in weathered faces, these are the memories that add weight to shoulders, these are the memories that cause droopy postures and halfhearted smiles. If you do want to be attentive, engaged, and simply human, the only choice, really, is whether you’re going to be speaking or listening.
"If you do want to be attentive, engaged, and simply human, the only choice, really, is whether you’re going to be speaking or listening." I love that you end this meaningful piece with a challenge and a reminder of our own agency. Because while we may be one way or another by nature, we can change - as you've said and others as well. As years pass, I find myself maybe just as sensitive but wholly less reactive. . .more willing to ask myself "did that person intend a cut with that comment or did I understand wrong, etc etc" and it's made this sensitive soul much more enjoyable. Your essays are always so packed and thoughtful - they feel peripatetic, as if we've just walked and talked the park together.
"Even though sensitivity might in fact be a dial, with some people more squishy and other people more sturdy, I doubt that you have the ability to control where you land on the spectrum."
I may have misunderstood what you mean by this, but if I have not, then this is very wrong. I live with a (now very retired) Swedish army officer who for the longest time was directly involved in the training of conscripts doing their compulsory military service. There were indeed some 'squishy' people his job was to toughen up -- and that can be done -- but the larger job was to take people who weren't very sensitive at all and train them to a certain level of sensitivity -- enough that they could make discerning judgments as part of an assumed guerilla war (against the Russians). So, wherever you start on the dial, you can move? and perhaps a great deal?
But perhaps I am misunderstanding you altogether.