Emotions, emotions, emotions

Are artists more sensitive?

Have you ever been told you’re too sensitive?

Or do you just feel more sensitive than others—more emotional, more porous, more observant, more empathetic, more distressed?

I was talking about artists and sensitivity with my friend Karima Cammel (a wonderfully talented artist—see her work at Cammellot—and a wildly and wonderfully sensitive person). We were remarking how we didn’t feel our skin thickening with age. We weren’t getting more hardened or jaded—in fact, we felt more emotion, more anxiety, more love, more of everything.

And then we started talking about whether artists are more sensitive than others. I tend not to like this subject, because I think we’re all artists at heart, so by definition there should be no difference between us on any sensitivity scale …

… Except I think artists are different. Just to be called to the arts is to be a person who doesn’t live within boundaries. You’re seeking to live a life with fewer certainties. You’re living the questions, as Rilke said. And this is because you feel more, or feel differently—and then being an artist makes you feel even more than the more you’re already feeling just because that’s what making art is about.

To feel yourself, to express yourself is a risk—even to yourself sometimes. To open yourself to vulnerabilities instead of enforcing invulnerabilities puts you in a position to be rejected—our worst fear after death.

And one definition of being an artist is the practice of vulnerability. We’re constantly walking out into the world, essentially undressing ourselves, hoping for love and belonging, but often courting hate and ostracism.

I’ve never known an artist who didn’t have an intense, extreme side. I’ve never known an artist who doesn’t seek to go beyond conventional boundaries to live a different life—because life is felt too deeply. Life is a matter of the heart.

Too much heart?

One of my writing students told me she’s going to title her memoir Too Much because she’s always been too much, and I worried she said that in a pejorative sense. That made me think of a talk I heard Cheryl Strayed give, where she said that artists need to be “too much”—because that it is an artist’s job.

But that’s tough because the world tends to tell us that all of our “too muchness” is, well, too much. Inappropriate. Intrusive. Burdensome. We’re supposed to be nice and well behaved and neat and … contained. We’re supposed to keep all of our messiness in.

I wonder what life would be like if we viewed our messiness as a blessed, wonderful thing? I wonder what life would be like if we got gold stars in kindergarten for making messes and having big emotions and being a little too loud.

When we train ourselves to be quiet off the page, we risk training ourselves to be quiet on the page.

I’m writing about this because I’m generally at my worst when I’m too little. I’m writing about this because the people I like the most tend to be too much in some way. And I welcome whatever “problems” come with that too muchness.

I read that it's estimated that 15 to 20 percent of people are highly sensitive, but that percentage is likely much higher among artists and creative thinkers.

Not only might we be too much to begin with, but by practicing it as part of our art, we invite more “too muchness” in. We express ourselves more than we might feel comfortable. We accept (and perhaps relish) messiness. We create new definitions of being, new definitions of expression. Because that is where we feel life.

Thinning skin

The Marginalian recently featured Jenn Shapland’s essay collection Thin Skin. Shapland was literally diagnosed with “thin skin,” meaning that her epidermis was missing a layer. She uses thin skin as a metaphor in her essays for being more connected with the world, and I think her “thin skin” is part of feeling “too much.”

“To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice,” she wrote.

I like this definition because our culture reveres having a thick skin so much. A thick skin gives you invulnerability, but that invulnerability can become a limitation—and a misleading ideal. Shapland says:

“I began to question the idea of myself as a being in need of protection, indeed as something that could be protected. Nothing can protect us … It struck me as I wrote that I was utterly vulnerable to every other person, every other creature on Earth, and they were also vulnerable to me … I began to seek other ways of understanding the self that might be more useful than this shivering, weak thing we must shore up against the world.”

If you find yourself breaking into tears for who knows what reason (as I have been doing of late), that’s because we’re partially exposed. That can feel like a weakness, a frailty, but it’s a gift. And even a superpower. Because we’re open to unseen connections.

I wonder what the world would be like if we saw the criers among us as our prophets? What if we celebrated people with deep feelings as much as we celebrate any billionaire or Nobel prize winning scientist?

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web,” said Picasso.

To be so highly attuned to the world can be an exhausting and lonely task. Our antennae can easily become overloaded. Hurt. But our deep emotions shouldn’t be something to hide; they should be something to celebrate.

May your thin skin be porous to every little thing, the glow of light emanating from an autumnal tree, memories of a past love, the droop of a grandparent’s skin, a baby crying on a plane, the glorious sweep of a sunset, nightmares, psychic incantations, the most subtle injustice in the world, the sounds of ants walking, the loving coo of owls, your heart.

This week’s challenge: being too sensitive

Can you notice what you’re especially sensitive to? How are you sensitive? How do you express it? Can you identify one sensitivity and write a paragraph about it? Can that paragraph become a poem? A character trait? An essay?

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Because sensitivity can be an act of rebellion

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

—Albert Camus

Because sensitivity can be both tragic and beautiful

“Why love what you will lose?

There is nothing else to love.”

—Louise Glück

Because why not?

“I mean, if you’re going to err, you might as well do so on the side of audacity.”

—Sue Monk Kidd

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Because a photo

I went for a morning jog at the Albany Bulb, which is famous for its art made from refuse …