You Are Not Too Sensitive

Someone says something small. A colleague is short with you in a meeting. A message arrives with no warmth in it. An hour later you are still carrying it, and underneath the carrying is a second feeling, worse than the first: why does this get to me? Other people let this go.

So you reach the conclusion almost everyone reaches. You are too sensitive. It is a flaw in your make-up, and the work is to toughen up, care less, grow the thicker skin that other people seem to have been issued with at birth.

I think that conclusion is wrong, and I think it is wrong in a way that keeps people stuck for years.

Here is the picture I use instead. Near a black hole, the pull on the near side of an object is much stronger than on the far side, so the object is stretched — pulled out into a long thin thread. Astronomers call it spaghettification, with a straight face. You do not need the astronomy. You need the picture: something whole, pulled until it is thin.

Now think about an ordinary Tuesday. Your attention has been out on a screen, on a deadline, on somebody else's urgency, on a worry about Thursday. By four in the afternoon there is very little of you anywhere in particular. And a thin thing is not robust. A change of plan, an offhand remark, a traffic jam: none of these are catastrophes, and all of them tear straight through, because there is not enough of you in one place for them to bounce off.

You are not too sensitive. You are too thin.

The difference matters, because the two diagnoses lead to opposite work.

If the problem is sensitivity, the work is to feel less. Harden up. Care about fewer things. Be the kind of person a remark cannot reach — which, as it happens, is the state my novel is about, and the novel refuses to say whether that is what he wanted or what he lost.

If the problem is thinness, the work is to feel exactly as much as you do now, and to have more of yourself present while you feel it. Not armour. Weight. The remark lands the same way; there is simply more of you standing there when it does.

And weight is buildable in a way temperament is not. That is the hopeful part, and it is why I wrote the book rather than a shorter and more sympathetic essay. You cannot decide to be less affected by things. You can absolutely decide, several times a day, to stop spending yourself in twelve directions at once and bring your attention back to one place. Do that enough and the small knocks stop going straight through, not because you have stopped caring but because there is finally something there for them to hit.

The people I know who are hardest to upset are not the coldest people I know. Most of them are the warmest. That ought to be a clue, and for most of my life I managed to miss it.