The Sensitive Ones

“I think the more we know about what makes people the way they are and how hard it would be for them to be otherwise, the freer we are to be more generous.” -Robert Karen
 

Do we ever arrive at a place just beyond me vs. you? Are we ever complete enough, fully grown, fully measured? I don’t want to be right, I want to be, in a place just between what I think I know and what undoes me.

When I feel hurt and wounded I can all too easily slide into the state of mind that says; “only one can survive here.” And yet the very thought suggests otherwise. Only one cannot survive, and the struggle is to lean into the place where all can survive. But this takes time. Not always very long, but who can measure? For the wound is a wound and it needs dressing. Still, “The mania of number one is supported by many agonies.”

“Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy,” an often asked question in recovery. With specific hurts, especially when the inflicted wound seems so unnecessary, when it seems to arrive from a place where there is no there, there – it becomes easier to cast off the question, to dig in and say “but I am right!” Why would that matter? Isn’t this, after all, what the questions begs of us? Why would that matter?

It doesn’t. This too, takes time to arrive at our door step. Attentive waiting, an art of indecision, this is never something that comes with the deal of being human. It is something that has to be wrestled with. To bear the tension of failing to enter the revenge chain,  which only ever continues to fertilize us with the idea of destruction as corrective. This, Michael Eigen suggests, requires something new of us, which, when it comes to Hamlet, would require a new kind of man, which “from the warrior viewpoint, might be weak, sissy. Isn’t it amazing to be proud of being non reflective? Ashamed of being self reflective? I’m rooting for Hamlet to endure more shame. It’s now up to us. It’s our turn.”

In rehab I was taught that it was not my shame, the collective scars of trauma that I had been left with, but perhaps here, this certain kind of shame that comes with being sensitive, is one that I should own. “I’m sensitive and I’d like to stay that way” as Jewel once sang.

My version vs. your version, my heaven vs. your heaven. Or is there a place where there are “different Gods but the prayer is the same?” I do not actively root for people to fail or to hurt, in part because I have known too much of that in my lifetime already. Failure and hurt, these two things seem to have something in common, don’t they? Often those who failed us, hurt us. Many, I think, yearn not to do the same as was done to them. Yearn to wait, to hold the tension, to watch the clock, count the minutes, hold the breaths, rock the body, feel the floor.

This is not some graceful or easy task. This is sometimes hell. Not the hell of other people, but the hell inside us. Can we climb our way toward some sort of limbo, and then beyond? Kindness is always courageous. Our society teaches us that sensitivity is a negative trait; you’re too sensitive, grow a thicker skin. Have you ever noticed that the human body actually doesn’t physically have such a thick skin? It is easily broken into, scraped, gashed scarred. And it not so easily heals, also.

What would having a thicker skin mean? That I pretend that things that hurt me actually don’t phase me at all? That being on the receiving end of cruel or mean statements are like hearing the words “good morning” or “I love you“? Perhaps I have always “thrown like a girl” (meaning; I’ve not fit the perfect mold for boy“) growing up I was told this often. Why would that matter, I always wondered. And still. Why would it matter if I were sensitive, soft? If I didn’t throw a ball hard enough maybe it was because throwing things wasn’t something that I felt in my body and in my heart. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it.

Protecting the self, setting boundaries, is really the only option that does the least amount of harm. Some will go out of their way to find a there, there where there is none. They will call you by name, they will say this one, he/she/they are this or they or that. Am I this or that? Are any of us? Then I need to extend this to the ones who would go out of their way to hurt me also. I must wager that they are not this or that. That they are more loving and kind than they have been to me in a single moment. (Haven’t I been here before myself after all, on the other end?) Maybe my heart is in this and not in throwing.

“Don’t force your heaven on others or give yours up too long for someone else’s version. There’s Heavenly etiquette. It’s quite a currency we’ve discovered, negotiating heavens, emotional riches. An amazing thing is heavens keep changing. By going into one, others open. At some point, the I-you business becomes less important. You get tired of having to be in the I vs. you mold too long. It’s nice swimming with someone, bobbing up in different places, light glistening in the waves. No one pays much attention to who’s where and we don’t try to drown each other or want much more than what’s happening because it’s so good bobbing about. We bump and bounce, toward-away-in-through-with-against, under and up again: “There you are. Oh, you’re the one I was mad at because our heavens were different, the one who wouldn’t share the way I imagined things might be? And here we are!“.  -Michael Eigen “The Sensitive Self”

That’s how I would like to be. We all know this isn’t a place that we can always find or live in easily. We come and go, move in and out of it, like a road side motel that we must keep returning to. On the road we have our rage but in our rooms, in the water, in our hearts, we say; “Oh, there you are, the one I was raging about, you aren’t so different than me after all, are you? Good morning, I love you.” This might require a new me, or the only me worthy of me and of us. Sensitive, yes. What if sensitivity were the thicker skin?

“If only we could trace life to its beginning, we might be able to hold its secret in our hand. To open and close a hand, all the things hands do, signalling peace or war, putting one’s palm to one’s heart or to the heart of another, signalling a caring core – such sensitive hands. We try to get into each other’s sensitivity in good ways, in bad ways. We need each other’s feelings as much as, sometimes more than, food. Survival needs are embedded in emotional contexts.

Sensitivity is more than twitches in response to physical stimuli. Beings are sensitive, and by the time we get to the use of touch to mediate emotions we must say that someone is sensitive.  When a mother touches a baby it is not one blank body touching another. Someone is touching someone. There are physical tasks to be taken care of, but these occur in emotional fields. Any touch has tone and texture, and its own kind of meaning. It takes a particular kind of touch to say, “I am not touching you feelingly but simply to dress a wound or clean a mess.” If you ever need a mess cleaned when you are old and helpless, the feel of the clean can be more important than the clean itself. This we know, because old people tell us so. A baby cannot talk but expresses itself all over, and we can feel it tingling or tightening and everything in between. A body is an emotional body, an imaginative body, an expressive body. It is amazing we have managed to abstract an anatomical body from the person who permeates it, as if it were an uninhabited shell.

We are alive in the under- and over-side of our skin. The same might be said of our gut-mind, how sensitive intake-output is to changes of feeling and fortune. Add breathing, heart, nerves – all tied to the felt meaning of things. Our organs and their functions contribute images to the language of joy and injury.

Words cut deep. Looks cut deep. Where are these deep cuts? We point to our heart or gut or neck, but their pain, an emotional pain, signals a living being, a person. Someone is injured. And someone is uplifted when the spirit of a word uplifts…

Emotional reality appears now this way, now that way, and waiting on the unfolding of alternative views is some insurance against being swept off by a single, destructive conclusion.” -Eigen “The Sensitive Self”

In being hurt, at first, we sometimes conclude that the person who hurt us must be a weaponized body, when the truth is that like us, they are a sensitive body. And part of knowing this in our hearts means knowing and remembering the hurt that we have caused others in the past, whether with an unkind or impatient remark, a rude gesture, a failure to be of aid or comfort to someone who needed it. We’ve all been the doer the done to. And something more loving and in-between than this.

Yes, it’s true; I would rather be sensitive than not, happy than right. I would rather extend compassion to the one’s who hurt me than fulfill/travel a dead end street/cycle of revenge, of trying to prove a pointless point.

At what point do we say, instead; “There you are. Oh, you’re the one I was mad at because our heavens were different, the one who wouldn’t share the way I imagined things might be? And here we are!”
With more than enough room in the water for us both.

***

“I’m Sensitive”
-Jewel
​
I was thinking that I might fly today
Just to disprove all the things you say
It doesn’t take a talent to be mean
Your words can crush things that are unseen
So please be careful with me, I’m sensitive
And I’d like to stay that way.
You always tell me that is impossible
To be respected and be a girl
Why’s it gotta be so complicated?
Why you gotta tell me if I’m hated?
So please be careful with me, I’m sensitive
And I’d like to stay that way.
I was thinking that it might do some good
If we robbed the cynics and took all their food
That way what they believe will have taken place
And we’ll give it to anybody who has some faith
So please be careful with me, I’m sensitive
And I’d like to stay that way.
I have this theory that if we’re told we’re bad
Then that’s the only idea we’ll ever have
But maybe if we are surrounded in beauty
Someday we will become what we see
‘Cause anyone can start a conflict
It’s harder yet to disregard it
I’d rather see the world from another angle
We are everyday angels
Be careful with me ’cause I’d like to stay that way”