On Sensitivity

Pretty Lady can tell that most of you are rolling your eyes already. First she posts a guest column about Equal Pay for Equal Work, and now this. "The Other Shoe has Dropped," she can hear you thinking. "Pretty Lady is, and has been all along, a Closet Socialist, just lurking in wait to entrap us, and now, here we are. Sensitivity, indeed. Hmph."

And indeed, Pretty Lady could go on to bore you with many long stories about her stint in Northern California, where Sensitivity Blackmail is a standard and accepted part of the cultural landscape. One cannot pick up a six-pack of sushi there without trampling on someone's Childhood Issue, which must be addressed at great length and drama before anybody gets dinner. And Pretty Lady can attest that if someone deprives her of dinner to whine about their vague and amorphous problems, heads will eventually roll.

So that when, once upon a time, in her capacity as Chief Skimmer of all incoming library material, she happened upon a document entitled The Highly Sensitive Person, Pretty Lady veritably snorted. "Sensitive, ugh. 'Namby-pamby blackmailing whiner,' is more like it. I am certainly Not Sensitive. This piece of new-age self-help crap has nothing to do with me."

But she took the quiz anyway, having nothing better to do, and scored in the 99th percentile.

Suddenly, many things made sense. You see, Pretty Lady had always assumed that everybody experienced the same extreme discomfort, bordering upon physical pain, at the onslaught of punk rock music, Harleys, backfiring trucks, fluorescent lights, high winds, screaming, the smell of a close friend who has given up bathing for Lent, and the incessant inane giggling of brainless, nubile females. She took it for granted that whenever someone in the room was upset about something, everyone else was so concerned about it that they could not concentrate until the problem was addressed. She thought that the reason people drink so much in night clubs is to somewhat anaesthetize the agonizing misery induced by loud music, pointless chatter, lighting designs that split the difference between murky and garish, and the odor of stale cigarette smoke blended with beery floors, with the slightest undertone of vomit. Forthwith, she assumed that just about everyone in the world was very, very brave and stoic. So she was stoic too.

Yes, it was an enormous revelation to her that most people don't even notice all of that. For Pretty Lady, learning to like the accoutrements of routine adolescent social life was akin to developing a taste for wasabi, or the late works of James Joyce. It required discipline, commitment and a willingness to suffer. Pretty Lady, for love of her fellow man, was quite ready to do so, and would never even think of whining about it, much less of asking anyone to extinguish his Camel Filterless. She grew to revel in it, and to this day the aromas of Pall Mall and unwashed male bring back some sun-drenched memories.

But she did, after some thought, finally give herself permission to Go Home Early, upon occasion.

You see, in Pretty Lady's view, acknowledging one's sensitivity is not about Weakness, nor about Control. It is simply about Resource Management. Because sensitive persons are not simply the Darwinian rejects of the herd, fit only as wolf feed; we are Specialists. In the full, disciplined power of our specialization, we have the ability to put our finger right where it hurts and gently coax the pain away.

But in order to become fully empowered specialists in misery-eradication for the larger human race, we must learn to care for and appreciate ourselves, exactly as we are. This does not mean Banning Things; our purpose is not to control the outer world. It is to create oases of peace and quiet understanding, where we occasionally invite the world in to heal itself.