An Argument for Sensitivity

The Not-So-Small Challenge of Faith in the Face Of Exposure

When you’re in your twenties, you may often find yourself feeling more like an open nerve than a human adult. I, in particular, have never been quite skilled at taking things with a grain of salt, even as a child. I take things with the entire salt cave. Just as I am highly sensitive to beautiful, wonderful things, I remain equally sensitive to the difficult parts of life; the parts that lead me only to indecision, to heartbreak, to confusion, to grief, to embarrassment.

The fragility of the experience of youth seems to come in large part because it is so public. Even when you feel invisible and unimportant, you emotionally exist on a theatre-in-the-round in front of every person you have ever felt regarded by, feverish with the hope to perform well enough for a standing ovation. And it won’t matter when your mother tells you that life is best lived without the weight of others’ opinions, and it won’t matter when your best friend tells you that the decision you made out of emotion was just because, “you are a very sweet girl with a very big heart.” The sense of exposure that comes with existing amongst others in day-to-day life, whether illusory or not, remains.

When I first began law school at Cornell, I ended a relationship of nearly five years just a few weeks into the semester. This went as one would imagine it would: I discovered that life is really quiet when you’re not accompanied by somebody all the time, and that our minds are highly skilled at filling that quiet. For the first time since 17, I experienced every feeling for the first time without another person softening the blow. With no one rushing to provide context, every single emotional experience I had felt transformational. This also meant that my defenses against the whims of others were low. I realized in an expeditious fashion that trust had to be earned.

As time went on, I began to resent my chronic affectiveness. My efforts to understand myself and the world around me better led to a deep affinity with attentiveness. In people’s smallest expressions, I discovered meaning and held onto it tightly. The energy it took for me to exist in this vigilant state, however, was nothing compared to the energy it took for me to pretend it wasn’t happening. Maybe if I could convince people that I was just a very cool, very chill girl—a fun one, a detached one, an unmoved one—I would not only feel less, but no one would be able to decipher my true vulnerability, and the chances of getting hurt would plummet.

But this logic only applied to me, of course. I will always be the first one to tell my friends to cry it out, to say exactly what’s on their heart; to be unafraid in their pursuit of connection and truth and fulfillment. What’s the point otherwise? Whose rules are you following? Why should you pretend to be someone you’re not for someone else’s comfort? I love you, I would say, and everyone feels how you feel, I would say, and you don’t have to hide it just because other people do. And if others want to pretend that they don’t feel that way, don’t they just scare you? Why would you want to be anything like them?

My hypocrisy only continued, bleeding its way into other parts of my life. For the past four years, I’ve been building a platform to educate young women on how to succeed. My sincere belief is that truly effective early career education has to reach young women in their hearts, not just their minds. That means that between sharing my templates and tools, the majority of my work is done in my one-on-one conversations. Though I am a stranger, I am trusted with the intimate details of the lives of girls whom I will never meet. They tell me of their exhaustion and their motivations and their dreams, and it is my job to see through them, not just hear them: to understand that you can’t separate your school life or your career goals from what’s happening in your own head. To stifle sensitivity in the face of these young women’s intimate confessions to me would be to deny them a witness to the complexity of their lives.

Everyone deserves a witness, don’t they?

And in this contradiction, I reach a crossroads. My refusal to compromise on holding space for the emotional lives of others is a matter of values and of purpose. It is borne of genuine conviction, but perhaps equally of the hope that those around me will feel the same duty to me. To insist on denying myself the same sensitivity that I believe in giving to others would not just be disingenuous on a personal level but would mean that everything I have built is a contradiction. It is for this reason that I have realized that the most authentic persuasion a young woman could have is her refusal to perform invulnerability.

Theory, as it happens, is much easier to hold than the moment that asks you to prove it. Recently, someone asked me what I truly felt about a circumstance in my life, and I lied. I lied because I felt like my candor was a liability. At its core, this instinct to protect myself by obscuring my real feelings is not wrong or misled, but the residual impact of the instinct is. To be clear, I don’t mean that one should say everything they feel. There are many times when things are better left unsaid, and there may be times when it is actually obligatory to keep thoughts internal. The problem isn’t whether or not the truth is expressed to anyone else. Rather, it lies in the cycle of constructing a lie you then have to live inside of, and the shame that inevitably comes from forcing yourself to buy into your own facade. It is now that I realize that being dishonest about the matters of my mind and my heart does not actually protect me. It just hardens me. It leaves me unprepared for moments that do indeed require that complete and total integrity. I must learn to be as faithful to myself as I am to the people I love most.

It is only through this faithfulness, consistently practiced, that a person can learn to receive their own sensitivity not as a burden to be managed, but as the clearest channel to everything true. The world will give many opportunities to perceptive, ambitious, and hopeful women to put walls up. Take none of them, and run.