Originally posted on 7/26/2015
I grew up in a house where people did not cry.
This is a lie. I cried a lot. I mostly cried alone, and I grew up believing that crying was something you did alone, because you should not cry. Crying was not okay. Crying was weakness, it was vulnerability, it was wrong. When I cried my mother would tell me not to cry. She didn’t do this out of meanness, she did this because she was also raised not to cry. We are a society that raises children not to cry, that tells people to be ashamed of their feelings, that pathologizes and overmedicates sadness and grief. It fucks us up.
It is amazing how many years and many hours of therapy later, I still feel guilty when I cry. It is hard-wired into me, this guilt. It is that voice I always hear: Don’t cry. Don’t be so sensitive. Why do you have to be so sensitive?
In the always-changing field of neuroscience, there is a good amount of energy currently being devoted to studying why some people are so sensitive. In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain cites evidence that children may just be born sensitive, meaning they have less of a tolerance for stimulation of all kinds, whether it’s audiovisual or emotional. But she also takes this a step further, to illuminate the ways in which sensitivity can be a strength. Those who are naturally more sensitive may experience more pain - especially in a world that is overstimulating even for the less aware - and be more avoidant and solitary as a result. But they are also more empathetic, more caring, more altruistic, more artistic, more reflective, more intuitive, better listeners.
I wish when I was younger that I’d had more access to discourse like Cain’s. I spent a lot of my adolescence and young adulthood battling pretty severe depression, and that depression was complicated by feelings of shame around being so affected by the world around me. Why do I care so much? Why do I hurt so badly? I used to imagine I was literally empathic, and my powers included my ability to feel the pain of others. No wonder high school was so hard for me. Teenagers are walking emotional Molotov cocktails. You try being sensitive around that much simmering emotion all the time and not falling apart.
My most recent struggle around my sensitivity has taken the form of battling chronic and debilitating migraines. Migraines are a very obvious physical way that the body reacts to overstimulation, stress and trauma. Over the last four or five years, I spent a lot of time telling myself that I could “handle” what was being thrown at me, whether that was the non-stop stress of social work school or the vicarious PTSD derived from doing trauma work, the loss of a number of my relatives, a displacing cross-country move, a broken ankle, numerous familial illnesses. I worked a job that depleted all my physical and psychological resources up until the day I literally could not get out of bed. I was surrounded by other social workers and mental health professionals who seemed to be doing fine in their jobs, and all I could hear was that voice: Why do you have to be so sensitive? Don’t cry.
It has been a little over 4 months since I left my job. I have recently begun working part-time as a therapist again, and it is absolutely all I can handle to see 5-6 clients a week. I am still getting migraines 2-3 times a week. I feel immense guilt for not doing more, because I have spent so much of my time fighting my own sensitivity by doing as much as I possibly can that I don’t know how to do anything else. It’s like learning to walk all over again. It’s terrifying. The doctor who I go to for biofeedback tells me repeatedly: Be as good to yourself as you are to other people. I don’t even know what that means. You’re a sensitive, she told me a few weeks ago. It’s hard.
Watching the incredible Netflix series Daredevil, I had a revelatory moment when I realized: Daredevil is a sensitive. He is this literally - the tragic accident that left him blind when he was a kid also gave him enhanced senses - but he is also emotionally raw, constantly vulnerable. When he first got his enhanced senses, he had to learn to block out much of the world in order to survive the everyday. He compensates in exactly the way most sensitives do in a society that doesn’t value his sensitivity - he goes out every night and gets beat up, his emotional pain manifested physically in blood. If you punish yourself for it, sensitivity is okay. This is the lesson we teach the Daredevils of the world: if you must be sensitive, you also damn well better be useful.
It is hard to feel useful when I can’t work full-time, when I can’t achieve in the ways that I’ve always used as barometers of my self-worth. But I’m trying. I’m trying to see my sensitivity as a superpower and not a handicap, my capacity for empathy and my listening abilities as valuable, my time spent resting as healing and not laziness. When I cry I try to see it for the release it is, not some sign of my inability to cope. I try every day to accept where I am in this moment, quieting the loud and self-critical voice that constantly harangues me for not having a plan or a purpose.
If you’ve got this particular superpower too, just know: no matter how this world seeks to isolate you, you are not alone.