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Grab some coffee or a big glass of wine or a liter of water. Because I have something to say and it's going to take a while.
As a child, I was often told that I was "too sensitive." I remember feeling, when people said that, that I didn't know what they meant. It wasn't that I didn't know the meaning of the word itself, but I didn't understand how it was being applied to me.
Often, that charge was said to me when I reacted outwardly to feelings of being hurt - that is, when I let my feelings show. I can see now, especially as a parent myself, that the speaker was probably trying to get me to shrug off something that had been said to me or done to me. They tried to get me to shrug it off, with the phrase, "You're just being too sensitive," as a way of telling me that I was someone who feels hurt too easily. And their saying that to me also required that they felt that whatever had been said or done didn't, in their estimation, merit hurt feelings. And that their estimation overrode my actual feelings of hurt.
Nowadays, you might think of this as something some people refer to as de-legitimizing someone's feelings or invalidating them.
So who is to judge whether any of us should feel hurt? Who defines the threshold for when any one of us feels hurt? And why must we believe or accept that someone other than us should and can define for us and the rest of the world that what has been said or done should or shouldn't give rise to us feeling hurt?
Now, the fact that I'm suggesting that you think about those questions might sound as though I'm arguing that there is no objective standard for whether or not some act, behavior or speech can be judged universally as hurtful, offensive, wrong, off-limits, plain old mean, or none of those things at all and, in fact, just something to be shrugged off.
But that is the furthest idea from what I'm intending to imply or have you infer. And so, what I am going to do is expose myself in order to demonstrate the following:
1. What I believe is already the standard that many of us very likely use for knowing when acts or words will be hurtful enough that we shouldn't use them.
2. Why it is that it matters that we evaluate the hurt potential in anything we say or do, and that the results of that evauluation has nothing to do with whether or not the one against whom the act or words are directed actually feels hurt.
3. This standard (for knowing when an act or our words are going to be so hurtful that we shouldn't use them) does not and should not change simply because political acts or speech are involved.
Between the ages of eight and sixteen, I attended three different overnight camps. For six of those summers, I was a camper at the same all-girls camp in the middle of Maine. Just to get this over with: it was the stuff of New York/Long Island/Westchester Jewish American Princess stereotypes.
Except, I was the one that didn't fit in - you know how "there's always one"? I was that one. I'd heard the too sensitive thing from my parents, my siblings, teachers, the parents of friends of mine. Now, counselors used it too and of course that didn't help my lack of being just like all the others. I even was the only one from: Connecticut! And not Long Guyland.
So, for the first three years, when I was between the ages of eight and eleven, although I may have wanted to conform, there wasn't all that much I could do about it. I'd ask my parents for certain things that the other girls had, but I knew my parents were non-conformists too and the answer was usually going to be no. (One example I recall is that my stationery was from CVS or the local drugstore while all the other kids seemed to have the Hallmark store stationer. A few of you may know exactly what I'm talking about: we traded stationery during rest hours, but no one ever wanted mine because it was considered too plain or just plain cheap).
Now, I'm not telling you this because I love these memories. I don't, and my parents know I don't, and we're past it all.
