Are you sensitive?

Personality is to the mind 🧠, what skin is to the body. 

Just like skin, personality serves both an expressive and protective function, and it can be damaged by exposure to external trauma and by how we care for ourselves.

Skin is the largest organ in our body, and it serves both an expressive and protective function. It’s how others know us, and how we know ourselves, and it also protects the internal organs from exposure. 

So another way to think of personality is that it’s the way we understand and express ourselves, and how we interact with the world and others.

Some skin is more sensitive than others…

Some skin requires special attention and care: allergic reactions, burning quickly in the sun ☀️, proneness to bruising. We call this sensitivity. 

Just like with skin, some people are innately more sensitive than others. In personalities, this means that they often feel more, and more deeply, than others in a similar situation. 

In itself, this sensitivity isn’t a problem, and can actually be a gift — allowing us to be more in tune with ourselves, our environment, and other people. Think of how deeply a great writer must feel to capture the nuanced emotions of a character in a way that resonates with others. Most of us can’t even begin to describe our feelings with that level of detail. Or imagine a food critic, pulling apart the details of taste that most of us just experience as “sweet” or “salty” until we read the critic’s work. Sensitivity, when well-honed, is a beautiful thing. 

The problem with sensitivity is that it narrows our tolerances. In engineering, a tolerance describes the limits of acceptable variation: if part A needs to fit into part B to make a machine work, how much wiggle room does part A have in its physical dimensions to still fit into part B before the machine fails? Some parts have wide tolerances — a screw could vary by millimeters in diameter and still hold the machine together – while other parts are very sensitive and will fail if the screw is off by nanometers. 

The more sensitive a person is, the more narrow their tolerances — even small injuries, stresses or traumas can impair their functioning significantly. Imagine that same food critic being served a slightly overcooked hamburger (medium-medium-rare, vs. medium-rare 🍔). The food critic will find it hard to tolerate the burger, pushing the plate away in disgust and dismay, while the rest of us barely notice and scarf it down. 

In other words, sensitivity heightens the consequences of living — makes everything louder, more intense. When properly handled, that can lead to a rich and beautiful experience of the world, but otherwise can make life much more difficult to navigate and cope with.