Time for a thread on sensitivity. My personal model of excellence involves 3 variables: sensitivity, smarts and strength. Most people intuitively know why it’s good to be smart and strong, but sensitivity is too-often framed as a weakness
To me, sensitivity is about perceptiveness. It’s about paying attention to what’s going on, both inside and outside. It’s about recognising that what you see isn’t all there is, that what people don’t say can be more telling than what they actually tell you
Being sensitive means facing things that are painful, ugly, unjust, cruel. Why voluntarily do that? Because the alternative is to be cold, disengaged, detached - which is a sort of lifelessness. In severe cases it’s putting your humanity under house arrest
I do recognise that it’s possible to be “too sensitive to function”, like an exposed nerve that’s hurting 24/7. We all need ways to cope and manage
“Too sensitive for Twitter” is a telling phrase
“Let’s be painfully honest,” said Bourdain. Isn’t it interesting to contemplate this? Lots of people don’t like painfully honest. It’s too painful. So we pick seemingly-blissful ignorance. To avoid pain we are dishonest with ourselves and each other and that is a tragedy
To be more precise: in aggregate, we enjoy consuming the fruits of the labor of the painfully honest - but we aren’t sensitive about it ourselves. We mock and deride and shame, we are contemptuous and dismissive and indifferent
In my view, sensitivity is the highest status symbol. It’s peacocking for the soul: openly, willingly inviting ridicule and abuse in the pursuit of nourishing others. @terrycrews is my contemporary gold standard for this. How easy it would be for him to be vengeful & destructive
A frequent complaint from men is “why won’t women just tell us what they want”. But what our partners actually want (...my wife is going to save this tweet for future use...) is for us to be sensitive to their wants and needs without them having to ask
Yes, communication is practically the single most important thing in any r/ship. But the status quo is one where men (including me – sorry love, I’m trying to be better) often use the excuse of “but you didn’t ask” to avoid doing the work of paying attention & being sensitive
Because of massive structural/cultural sexism – this starts with boys being allowed to do whatever they want and girls being expected to be sensitive to everyone’s needs – practically all cishet relationships begin on uneven footing. It’s unfair to women
Like, I have nephews and nieces around 7–10 years of age. And I can already see how, when they start dating, they’ve already been pre-programmed with expectations of how boys and girls are supposed to be. Girls are supposed to do the bulk of the emotional labor. Massive scam tbh
