On Being Sensitive
I found the month of November and its attendant anxieties interminable. And here to reward us for our stalwart putting one foot in front of the other is December – which also seems somewhat interminable as we prepare to a face a new and frightening reality separately and together. Here’s some words I’d like to never hear again, so let me paradoxically write them down for you all to read: “You’re too sensitive.”
Can we just all get together and agree that “you’re so sensitive” is the ultimate put-down that’s actually a compliment? Standing in line, I heard a man gift the woman standing beside him with this well-developed line of argument:
HER: I’m stressed. I’m stressssssedddddd. I’m so stressed about the US election. Like what the AF is going on?
HIM: Dude, chill. Chillllll. Don’t be so sensitive.
HER: Don’t be so insensitive!
I had to flash her a thumbs up and stop myself from applauding. What great comeback, here’s to hearing more of them.
“Oooohhhhh… if I were a frog, I’d wife me a snake,” sang a child close to me. “Because a frog without a snake can’t get no break. And I don’t wanna be a frog noooo morrrrrreee.” This inimitable song is taken from the amazing graphic novel Stone Fruit, in which a queer couple slowly falls apart romantically but stays connected in order to continue to raise a shared child in their care. “What does that song mean to you?” I asked the sensitive child singing the song. “It means it’s hard to get a break when you’re a frog!” she said. “I mean, come on!” And truly, I agree, it is hard to get a break these days from a challenging, heartbreaking world. And yet, here's to all the frogs that keep on singing anyway.
The Talk
By Darrin Bell
How much do we tell our children? How much do we keep from them? In this question that is intimately related to privilege are whole worlds - whole worlds of violence too often unseen and unspoken, unpacked by Darrin Bell in the beautiful and devasting graphic memoir The Talk.
In the words of my brilliant therapist, how do we "titrate" this beautiful, impossible world for our children as best and as imperfectly as we can? What an impossible task. In the front of our apartment building, we found a book of coupons for Dairy Queen. The kids were excited, and I for some reason decided to expound joylessly on the consumerist culture of “buy more” capitalism. “Don’t be a buzzkill,” said my wise partner, “or I may have to change that to your middle name.” So true, so true. As we struggle with the impossible chemistry of attempting to let in this beautiful, impossible world a little at a time, and as we struggle with our absolute inability to keep our children safe systemically from all of its ills, here are two books to help us and our sensitive children.
The Rhino Suit
By Colter Jackson
How do we let the brokenness of the world touch our sensitive hearts and not destroy them is the subject of the incomparable book The Rhino Suit. This book is for the sensitive child, which is to say, every child at their core. The little girl in this book has a wide-open heart, and it is easily bruised. She is easily delighted and easily despairing. “Everywhere she looked, there were beautiful things. But there were sad things too. She felt so much, sometimes the feelings overwhelmed her.” She is grief-stricken by litter, by dogs living on the street, by loneliness. At school they are learning about the rhino, about its thick hide and its big tough toenails. She decides to build a rhino suit, climbs in, and “away she went.” While it works at first for protecting her from the hard things in life, she can’t feel the wind in her hair or the warmth of her mother’s hugs. So even though she is scared, she decides to get out, because the thing about “feeling so much, is you feel the good stuff so much too. . . . Because the more you let in . . . the bigger the world becomes. And the more you can do to change it.”
Oh grief, hardship, and this beautiful, impossible world. A psychological and metaphysical truth: you cannot shut down the shadows without shutting out the light. “Let’s make snow angels, there’s snow today” said a child on my street, “It’s one of those blue sky days.” And here’s to having more of them.
Little Doctor and the Fearless Beast
By Lesléa Newman, illustrated by Maria Mola
I think the world needs more gentle people, said a former hairdresser while carefully cutting my hair. “I think the world makes it hard to stay gentle, but that we need to keep trying.” Here to help us keep on keeping on is Little Doctor and the Fearless Beast. Little Doctor is a child who doctors all the animals far and wide, “in exchange for her kindness, the crocodiles told Little Doctor tales.” Each legend is more daring and each escape more frightening than the last, and Little Doctor marvels “at the fearless beasts they described.” One day, a fearsome crocodile named Big Mean arrives for help. She is the “biggest in the land,” with fearsome jaws and stony eyes, and yet today, “her mouth is clamped shut.” Little Doctor examines Big Mean from nose to tail, and yet cannot find anything wrong. Perhaps she is running a temperature? But when she approaches to check, Big Mean “did not like that. Not one bit.” Little Doctor tries and tries, but Big Mean refuses to let her help, until Little Doctor is “tired and cross” and wonders why Big Mean is there if she is not going to accept care. Little Doctor soothes herself by helping the other creatures, and “As Big Mean watched Little Doctor’s tenderness toward her fellow crocodiles, something inside her softened. When Big Mean drifts into a restless sleep, Little Doctor hatches a plan. She will lower herself to take a look from a rope attached to the ceiling. But the rope snaps, and Little Doctor falls down, down…right into Big Mean’s mouth. Little Doctor shuts her eyes tight, expecting to be munched or crunched. . . . But instead "hears a small CHIRP.” She opens her eyes, and works quickly to untangle Big Mean's hatchlings, caught in an old aluminum can holder. When the hatchlings are free, they all gather to hear the fearsome tale Big Mean will tell:
"This is the story of great daring and determination". Big Mean’s eyes twinkled. “It is the tale of the fearless beast, Little Doctor, who could not rest until she had helped her fellow creature. Even a big mean one.”
Little Doctor glows: "I am a fearless beast, she whispered to herself. And together they danced until it was a new day."
I run hot. In other words, it is indescribably easy for me to lose my cool. While my beautiful sister who gave me this book is as gentle as the doctor here, I myself want to yell with unbelievable regularity. Walking away is very skillful, many therapists have told me. As is allowing a child to walk away and take some space. For the sensitive child, who is frightened by quick movements and wary of trusting even those trying to help, here are Little Doctor and Big Mean to help all of us see that the process of building a connection takes time and tenderness - two things of which we can never have enough.
“We Rip the World Apart” says novelist Charlene Carr, and yet, as I sit here, my beautiful partner reclines in my favourite pair of her blue pajamas reading this very novel to understand more and better how to weave those broken worldparts together again. “Choose joy,” commands feminist artist Maria Popova. “Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature.”
English is a limiting language, the Japanese expression mono no aware is so beautifully expressed in the picturebooks above, a gentle sorrow brought on by the “pathos of things” and our ongoing “sensitivity to impermanence” (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole). Like the icicle below, no less beautiful in the day for the fact that it will have melted by the evening, these books help me to relish those beautiful tendrils all around us. Nurture the light inside you, friends: nobody gave it to you - and nobody can take it away. Let us shelter our individual and collective lights separately and together as we hold each other close, closer, using these tendrils to hold each other as close as we can. For me, these picturebooks are links to that “perfect and beautiful world” for which "we all long" (Cain, Bittersweet, xxviii) - they are "little joys" or "slender threads" from "we weave the lifeline that saves us.” Here's to finding more of them.
Until Soon,
Shoshana