I’m thinking, today, about sensitivity. Not the kind that makes you cry upon seeing a particularly poignant cat food commercial (and besides, I think that’s called PMS), but the kind that makes your hackles go up. I think we’ve all experienced this. You meet someone. You don’t like them. Or, you may find them charming, but can’t shake the feeling that there’s something not quite right about them. They are going to cause drama and you’re reluctant to have them near you. Don’t quite trust them. That’s the kind of sensitivity I’m talking about.

I think there are times in our lives when we’re totally in tune with the sensations caused by this sort of sensitivity. Childhood, for example. We are at our most basic, and at the same time, our most attuned to self preservation instincts. It’s how we learn. As we mature, we turn down the volume on the cacophony of messages about things we just seem to “know”, and behave more rationally. It’s no coincidence that during that same period of time, we start making messes, hurt ourselves, hurt other people, and generally feel confused and disjointed. It’s where we seem to pick up our self-inflicted baggage and only after the first decade or so of adulthood is over do you start to come out of the haze of learned behaviors, and starting relying again on things that you just know.

Developing my own sensitivity to those things that I know is an exercise sometimes. It seems that we disregard the instinctual so often that it’s dulled past the point of usefulness. But it can surprise you. It pokes out like a prairie dog from a burrow to let you know that’s something’s up. There’s something you need to watch for. “They” say that when a woman is in her 30s, she really begins to come into her own. A contention that, admittedly, I’d been pretty quick to dismiss as bullshit. But now that I’m well there, I’m a little more willing to give it some credence. Being able to integrate my inherent sensitivity into the other ways of behaving that I’ve been taught has turned out to be incredibly, well, helpful. I am now the proud inhabitant of a drama-free life.