Bird by Bird

Feeling Sensitive

I WAS ONCE spending time with a friend who suddenly announced, “I’m bored and I’m angry.” I asked her why she’d blurted that out. She told me that she was bored sitting around with me and angry because she’d wanted to go for a walk and no one had wanted to go with her. I thought her honesty was terrific. At that moment, I was reminded of a college friend who had taken a life course called Direct Centering, which soon proved to be a scary cult. She proudly announced that, thanks to this program, she could now tell people exactly how she felt about them. If she was angry, she could tell them so; if she felt a sexual attraction, she could also say that. Luckily, I was off the hook on both counts: she was neither attracted to me nor angry with me.

I wanted to ask her what she would do if she was both angry with and sexually attracted to the same person at the same time. What would she say? I also was curious as to whether there were any emotions other than rage and lust that were permissible; there didn’t seem to be.

When I compared my two friends I had a realization: It’s always useful to know what others are feeling, but sometimes it’s not a bad idea to keep your feelings to yourself.

Much of life is spent trying to divine the emotions of those around us. I texted someone an hour ago and I haven’t heard back. Does that mean she’s mad at me? I thought her phone message was a bit abrupt, and I always “like” her posts on Facebook and she never “likes” mine back. Did I do something wrong? They didn’t invite me over and they invited everyone else. Do we have a problem? Was she giving me the stink-eye? Why does he now sign his emails “Best” when it used to be “Warmest”?

And we spend much of life quietly simmering; we want to share but we don’t, for fear of sounding peevish or petty or just because we prefer to sulk in silence. We’ve also all probably been burned at one time or another when we have expressed our feelings. (Hollywood loves to make a certain kind of movie where a character suddenly can only tell the truth. Chaos ensues. Just watch Liar Liar, a 1997 Jim Carrey movie about a lawyer who suddenly finds himself unable to lie, for one example of this genre.)

We communicate with one another far more frequently than we ever have before, giving occasion for hundreds more daily interactions, each ripe for misinterpretation.

So what to do? How to walk the line between boorish indifference to others and living in a state of constant anxiety about whether we have or haven’t offended, between letting others know how we are feeling and burdening them with information they don’t need or want?

When it comes to these kinds of questions, I often turn to Anne Lamott for guidance. I’ve gained more practical wisdom from her nine nonfiction books than I have from any other living writer. In her nonfiction she blends memoir and advice, chronicling the evolution of her own Christian faith, her journey through addiction and sobriety, and how she came to create community and family along the way—and she tells readers frankly what she’s been taught and what she had to learn. She’s written books about the death of her father from cancer, her son’s first year, and being a grandmother to her son’s son. She’s told stories about her friends’ lives with cancer and ALS. And she tells you exactly how she feels.

Lamott’s book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life is one of the few books I read once every few years. It has lots of advice that’s seemingly aimed at writers: about writing shitty (pardon the French, as my grandmother used to say) first drafts (just to get something down on paper); about the danger of perfectionism; about how you are going to be jealous of more successful authors, and you just have to deal with that. But, as promised in the subtitle, just about all of the advice applies not only to writing but also to life.

One of the most useful bits of wisdom comes in the story Lamott tells to explain why she gave this book its odd title:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

So whenever I’m thinking that a task is too big to tackle, or that I’ve procrastinated so much that it’s no longer possible, I think of Anne and her older brother and their father—and then I start to work on it bird by bird. Clean our apartment (which often resembles a frat house, boxer shorts and dirty mugs strewn everywhere) because there are guests coming in an hour? How to get that done? Bird by bird. Or, rather: boxer by boxer.

Anne Lamott walks readers through moral and spiritual and practical dilemmas in her life and the lives of others, mostly people she knows but also people she’s read about in books and seen on the news. As she explores her life and theirs, she gives me a map for walking through my own. When my mother was dying of cancer, we both found ourselves turning to Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, which we’d first read when it came out in 1999. Lamott writes that the two best prayers are quite simple: “Help me, help me, help me,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I used both again and again during my mother’s last months, though I also wasn’t above asking for more specific blessings, like a few more months with my mother.

In a more recent book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, she added a third prayer: the “Wow” that is the last word of the title. This is the prayer that helps you acknowledge all the wonder and blessings around: petals in spring; a Georgia O’Keeffe painting in a museum; a dance by Fred Astaire or Pina Bausch. There are “lowercase wows”—like “clean sheets after a hard day.” And “uppercase Wows. Yosemite. Fireworks.” Whether something is upper- or lowercase or a wow at all depends on us. I try to be aware of the “Wow” prayer at least once a day but usually forget. It’s much easier to remember to pray when life is going badly, or we’ve just been given a gift, than simply to stop from time to time to acknowledge how much awesomeness is often around us.

It’s not just what Anne Lamott says but how she says it. I love her voice on the page, her honesty: she’s brisk but warm, wry but tender. She’s my senior by only eight years, but she has a kind of hard-won wisdom that I associate with certain much-older elders I’ve encountered at key moments in my life. More than anything, she reminds me of my grandmother’s friend Alice who used four-letter words (out of my grandmother’s earshot) and could swallow a wooden matchstick and bring it back up again. I could always count on Alice to tell me the truth, tell it to me straight, listen to whatever I had to say, and never blow my cover on anything. That’s Anne Lamott.

Actually, Alice was probably the same age then as Anne Lamott is now. Funny, that. To my ten-year-old self, Alice seemed ancient, as I must now to the youngest people in my life.

Anne Lamott can write like nobody’s business or, rather, everybody’s. One minute you are smiling at a vivid image—her description of herself at the start of Bird by Bird as a little girl walking around with “my shoulders up to my ears, like Richard Nixon.” Then she throws in a joke or two—about how she was clearly the child most likely to become a serial killer or have “dozens and dozens of cats.” But right after she moves in for the kill: “Instead I got funny. I got funny because boys, older boys I didn’t even know, would ride by on their bicycles and taunt me about my weird looks. Each time felt like a drive-by shooting. I think this is why I walked like Nixon: I think I was trying to plug my ears with my shoulders, but they wouldn’t quite reach.”

Lamott’s father was a writer, and she wanted to be one, too. She realized that “one of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.” Lamott’s father believed that writing—like reading—teaches you how to pay attention. You would need to be sensitive in order to become the kind of writer that Anne Lamott is; but you could also say that the kind of writing that she does will make you more sensitive.

Sadly, sensitivity isn’t universally regarded as a good quality. For children, it’s okay—just as long as you aren’t labeled “oversensitive,” as Lamott was. In one of her recent books, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, published in 2013, Lamott writes about this:

If you were raised in the 1950s or 1960s, and grasped how scary the world could be, in Birmingham, Vietnam and the house on the corner where the daddy drank, you were diagnosed as being the overly sensitive child. There were entire books written on the subject of the overly sensitive child. What the term meant was that you noticed how unhappy or crazy your parents were. Also, you worried about global starvation, animals at the pound who didn’t get adopted, and smog. What a nut. You looked into things too deeply, and you noticed things that not many others could see, and this exasperated your parents and teachers. They said, “You need to have thicker skin!” That would have been excellent, but you couldn’t go buy thicker skin at the five-and-dime.

Any healthy half-awake person is occasionally going to be pierced with a sense of the unfairness and the catastrophe of life for ninety-five percent of the people on this earth. However, if you reacted, or cried, or raised the subject at all, you were being a worrywart.

For adults, the label “oversensitive” is rarely used, because, in most quarters, when people speak of an adult as being “sensitive” they almost always mean it pejoratively; the prefix “over” is redundant. “Sensitive” is bad all by itself; “sensitive” is code for oversensitive. Any kind of concern someone might raise in, say, an office setting can be dismissed with the accusation that the “complainer” is just being “sensitive” for raising it. This is especially true if the person who is raising the concern is not in the majority. Problems not experienced by the majority are often not seen as problems at all, and if they are, they are certainly no one’s fault; the fault is in the receiver’s too-sensitive antennae. “You’re just being sensitive” means “You are complaining about something everyone else thinks is trivial.” And that simply means “You are complaining about something that concerns you and not us, because we really don’t care about you.”

Sometimes when I’ve been accused of being sensitive, I’ve crumbled. Sometimes, I’ve doubled down, arguing my point. You can try to explain why something so small to others is so big to you, and you may succeed, or not.

But often encounters aren’t even that clear-cut. Someone will voice a concern, and others may acknowledge it, but has anyone really heard? Has anything changed?

So the questions remain—when to say how we feel and when to keep it to ourselves; when are we being sensitive and when too sensitive?

In Stitches, Lamott writes, “I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. I so resent this.”

I’m glad Anne Lamott told me she resents this. I resent it, too.