The dynamics of public education make it very difficult for any one adult (teacher, bus driver, principal, school nurse) to pay close, individualized attention to the large number of children in his or her care. Nowhere is this truer than on the school bus, where the brave bus driver must focus first and foremost on navigating a large vehicle filled with scarcely-secured young bodies through crowded streets, while managing to hit all the designated stops along the route. Busses are notorious platforms for bullies and mischievous serial-teasers, because such perpetrat-...ahem...kids are skilled at striking while the resident authority figure is otherwise preoccupied. These gremlins-in-kids’-clothing possess an uncanny faculty for homing in on introverts who deliberately avoid engaging them, and, upon marking their prey, stealthily move in for the kill, often unbeknownst to the authority figure on duty.
For children who possess such a rabble-rousing streak, scenarios like an hour-long ride on a crowded bus, or the parts of a school day that are unregulated (hallways between classes, recess, lunchtime) are like Petri dishes wherein the bacteria of their harassment can flourish. While much of what they do would be considered “harmless” by many, to a Highly Sensitive Child, not only does their behavior itself leave a deep impact, but so does the ramping up to the harassment, and its aftermath, as well. The HSP is often acutely aware of the entire process by which the taunt-er chooses her, gradually attempts to get under her skin, and then overtly strikes, and throughout this approach to the strike, the HSP grows increasingly tense while bracing against what’s to come and trying not to evince any sense of being flustered. Then there’s the harassment’s aftermath, in which the HSP is overwhelmingly conscious of the taunt-er’s acknowledgment of his or her effect on the HSP, as well as the responses of surrounding children who witnessed the taunt. After finding herself the butt of such an incident, an HSP needs personal time and space to process the event, and to slowly slough off the embarrassment and sting of it. The public school day, of course, does not offer such opportunities, save the occasional 2-minute solace to be found in a bathroom stall. So there is a social dimension to the soul-crushing potential of a day in the life of an HSP public school student. But the malaise is far more nuanced than just the social piece described above. Being shuffled through a highly structured day of lesson plans and activities designed for the masses in a crowded, intensely stimulating environment by adults primarily focused on crowd management and compliance with state and federal curricular mandates, runs counter to an HSP’s soul.
To be fair, school was far from pure misery for me because there were moments when my specific engagement with an assignment, or with a teacher or classmate, transcended the watered-down, mass-appeal quality inherent in the very premise of public education. Given sufficient time and a quiet environment, I could find ways to make an assignment my own – to take it further than perhaps it was designed to be taken. I would become deeply absorbed in the process, and would be able to block out external stimuli, which were typically overwhelming and distracting to me such that I counted the minutes until the school day's end. At times, a heartening connection would happen when I saw that my teacher saw how I had transformed an assignment from something rote to something intensely fleshed-out and expansive. In such moments, I could see something in the teacher herself (or himself) come alive – a spark. Such a shared moment of recognition would serve to encourage me, anchoring my experience, and making it feel more specific, less prescribed.
On the flip-side, though, there were so many hours and days like those spent in Mr. Hutto’s fifth grade classroom, when I could clearly see that he was passing along the barest-minimum from his teacher’s edition of our textbook, leaving us to complete our lessons in self-directed silence. Rather than focus on bringing the material to life, he focused on getting it neatly out of the way so that he could sit at his desk and do whatever, in anticipation of the moment he truly cherished each day: when a female student would raise her hand and ask for permission to use the restroom, and he would narrow his eyes, slowly curl his lips into a Grinch-like smile, and say, “O.K., but first, you have to come sit on my lap and give me some sugar, “ which was something he managed to say multiple times each day, to copious awkward chuckles and sidelong glances of disbelief.
While this may be an extreme example, it perfectly represents how agonizing school could be for me – and, I am guessing, for many students. I did not always fully trust the adults in whose care and under whose tutelage I was placed. And yet, I was subject to a system that was much bigger than me – a system designed to solve the problem of mass education. Such a system did not have the capacity to be responsive to individual students’ needs or preferences, at least not by design. As a Highly Sensitive Child, I was keenly attuned to behaviors that were less than professional on the part of some of my teachers (like Mr. Hutto, you dirty so-and-so), but, as a mere student, I did not have the power to call out those behaviors, or to refuse to follow a teacher’s orders on the basis of any such objections. This led to a practice of trying not to see what I saw – of trying to hide in my external affect any inkling that something in my environment was troubling or deeply disappointing to me, and internally, of trying to ignore the feelings that made it difficult for me to accept my present circumstances. This practice, unfortunately, became a habit, and it is one I continue to work to unravel to this day.
I had far more warm, dedicated, inspired teachers than I did duds, or at least, the gems stand out in far greater relief than do the creeps and slackers. But even the best public school teacher is faced with a seemingly impossible problem when it comes to the question of how to gear mass lesson plans toward individual students’ skill levels and capacity for engagement. The sheer math of the situation (one teacher, 30+ students) renders this challenge beyond daunting. I often felt, in the context of a public school day, like there were so many part of myself I had to silence – parts I had to let die, even – in order to reduce the cognitive dissonance between the education and educational environment I instinctively desired, and the lesson plans, text books, schedule, and school environment to which I actually had access. It became less painful to simply allow parts of my true nature to be crushed, than to allow them to flutter and pulsate inside of me while their every twitch reminded me of how excruciating certain dimensions of my public school environment and experience were to my sensibilities.
It’s funny. When you’re an HSP – even if you yourself, and those around you, don’t know what to call it – you will often be told, as a child or young adult, to “buck up!”, “deal with it!” and “get over it!”. Well-intentioned adults try to brace you for The Real World by coaching you with such statements, as a way of sort of sand-papering off your sensitive outer layer so that you can meet the world scuffed, calloused, and less apt to absorb its stings. But attempting to erase or quash what makes you you, is a recipe for soul sickness of the highest and most dire order, as the gifted Parker J. Palmer has so beautifully articulated. Further, our greatest “weakness”, as they say, can also be our greatest strength – or at least, our weakness holds the key to our strength. Cut off oxygen to your weakness, and you prohibit the full flowering of your highest potential. So what is an HSP to do in this world?
Perhaps it is unfair to refer to acute sensitivity as "weakness". However, any HSP/introvert can tell you that keen sensitivity makes navigating many aspects of daily life an intense adventure. It can make us feel like paranoid freaks, since we constantly pick up on things that others seem to miss entirely. It means we need more time to ourselves, to process and recover from the day. It can make certain environments seem all but untenable for us - environments most simply take for granted. It can make relationships a challenge, since others struggle to understand why a passing remark impacted you so deeply, or why you would rather spend time alone than do something "fun" with them. There is an art to learning how to flourish as an HSP in a world that notoriously caters to extroverts.
All of us – HSP and non-HSP's alike – get a lot of mixed messages in our culture. As children, we are encouraged, on the one hand, to “be ourselves.” We are told that we are "special", and that our uniqueness is the very seat of our value. Meanwhile, many of us are pumped through a public education system designed to cater toward the "average" child. Many of us find we must shave off the finest points of our uniqueness – or, at least, cover them in copious amounts of packing foam and duct tape – in order to survive this system. Should we fail to grind down or conceal our uniqueness, we risk being labeled as troublemakers (for asking too many questions, or for being made restless by a glut of desk-bound, book-based learning), or risk being ridiculed as "nerds", "brainiacs", or "artsy freaks." Most students ultimately cave to the pressure to "pass" as average and simply go along with the system out of sheer exhaustion and psychological fatigue.
Take a generation of such children and follow them into adulthood, and you will find an equally confusing professional environment. So many professional workplaces seem to require, or at least implicitly expect, a willing “standardization” on behalf of potential and existing employees. Take that uniqueness of yours – the parts of you that house the best of what you have to give – and button it down, shave it off, bleach it, dress it up in mascara and heels, and make sure it fits neatly into the larger mold of the business and profession in question, and that it does not draw undue attention to itself. So you buy those khakis and wax that facial hair and learn that professional jargon and hope it will give you the "in" you need...And then you apply for jobs (a whole ‘nother can-of-worms subject in the age of the online application vortex), and find these same companies asking you – khakified, bleached-out, buttoned-down you – to demonstrate what makes you stand out from the crowd!
While you will be asked to substantiate your one-of-a-kind edge to land an interview or nail a job, you will ultimately be evaluated on the extent to which the persona you project and the abilities you claim align with the company’s image of itself. I have often gotten the impression, in my many job searches, that companies are looking for someone they can plug in to their existing system with as little friction and as much ease as possible. Which leaves you, the inherently idiosyncratic applicant, with (it would seem) one of two choices: take a fierce rasp to all the pointy bits that give your profile its distinct shape (warning: it’s gonna get bloody – have you ever seen a rasp?!) until your horizon line starts to resemble the shape of the company or industry to which you’re applying; or, craft your application so that it expresses the best of who you uniquely are, and search tirelessly for companies or fields that might actually be interested in what your un-rasped self uniquely has to offer (and then pray God they give you the time of day – these well-suited companies and/or this field that you hope against hope exist – based on your existing level of experience and credentials).
Liz Ryan is someone I have been paying attention to as I wrestle with the above dilemma. Through her company, The Human Workplace, she asserts that we are in need of a professional revolution, one that puts people first by asserting that businesses will reap the greatest benefits by encouraging employees to bring the best and most vibrant parts of themselves to the work they do. Ryan asks, “When did the workplace become so ‘black and white’?”, and offers constructive guidance for bringing the color and vitality back to its sullen cheeks. As a former “corporate HR VP forever”, Ryan knows the corporate recruiting climate of which she speaks. She has worked successfully with businesses as well as individuals to create more people-centered workplaces, and to encourage a more colorful, more narrative-centered, and more fiercely individualized style of presenting oneself throughout the job search process.
While I find Ryan’s work incredibly inspiring, I must also acknowledge the painful reality of my own demoralizing experiences with job searches to date, and with working for workplaces that are far from human (or at least, functionally so). It can be hard to find workplaces progressive enough to entertain an out-of-the-box resume or cover letter. So many fields are steeped to saturation in formal requirements regarding the form and content of a resume or cover letter, and regarding acceptable methods for applying for jobs. Further, as someone who is currently engaged in the messy throes of a career transition, it can be extremely difficult to get companies to give a hoot about what you uniquely have to offer if you don’t have the specific degree or exact laundry-list of skills and years of experience in X-Y-Z they are looking for. While I may come to my job search able to articulate my strengths, credentials, and value, the more I consider where to set my new career sights and how to re-package my goods to fit new contexts, and the longer I sift through the job prospects and job descriptions at my fingertips, the more I am filled with that institutional-chicken-soup feeling once again. The more I feel like I am being asked to prove myself as a passable member of an alien herd – to prove that I belong in a world that I feel no affinity for whatsoever.
I want to find a way to give the best of what I’ve got in a place where it is needed and appreciated, but at present, I am stumped as to how to make that leap. As I go about work-a-day life in my current workplace, and as I continue my vision-quest for a more apt career path, any time I catch a telltale whiff of the gray, sour-mop-water broth that signifies “death through mediocrity”, a tiny bell deep within my HSP soul begins to rattle. This bell is made of delicate stuff: a shell of porous bird-bone, with a hummingbird feather for its clapper. The sound and vibration of this bell’s ring – inaudible to the outside world, yet cacophonous to me – fills me with the urge to run in the opposite direction – to an expansive place where I can breathe, create, relax, be me without artifice or constraint. I feel like the baby bird in the classic children's book, Are You My Mother?, wandering endlessly in search of a professional niche where I belong, and will be recognized as kin.