Sensitive

Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Granneman and Andrew JacobAll rights reserved.Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.HarmonyBooks.comRandomhouseBooks.comHarmony Books is a registered trademark, and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.ISBN 9780593235010Ebook ISBN 9780593235027Book design by Andrea Lau, adapted for ebookCover design by Irene NgCover art: Martin Gillman/Shutterstockep_prh_6.0_142781534_c0_r1 ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyrightIntroductionChapter 1: Sensitivity: Stigma or Superpower?Chapter 2: The Sensitive Boost EffectChapter 3: The Five Gifts of SensitivityChapter 4: Too Much, Too Loud, Too FastChapter 5: The Pain of EmpathyChapter 6: Full-Hearted LoveChapter 7: Raising a Sensitive GenerationChapter 8: More Than Just a PaycheckChapter 9: The Sensitive RevolutionDedicationAcknowledgmentsSensitivity Cheat SheetFurther Reading and ResourcesNotesIndexAlso by Jenn GrannemanAbout the Authors_142781534_ IntroductionIt starts with a boy and a girl. They’ve never met, but their stories begin the same. They’re from the Midwest, with blue-collar parents and not enough money. Neither of their families knows what to make of them. They’re different from other kids, you see, and it’s starting to show.Sometimes the boy seems normal enough. He follows the rules in kindergarten. He’s polite to his teachers, and kind to the other kids, but when recess rolls around, he shrinks. Something about the playground is too much for him. Instead of joining for kickball, or tag, or king of the jungle gym, he runs away. He flees from the screaming and laughing and hides in the only place he can find: an old storm sewer pipe.At first, the teachers don’t even notice, because he always slinks back at the end-of-recess bell. But one day he takes a kickball with him so he won’t be alone. It might be cute under different circumstances, but there are never enough balls to go around, and the other kids complain when they see him run off with it. That’s when the teachers find him, and the concern starts. His parents don’t understand: Why do you hide in a sewer pipe? What do you do in there? His answer—that it’s quiet—doesn’t help. He’ll need to learn to play with the other kids, they tell him, no matter how loud or overstimulating it is.The girl, on the other hand, doesn’t run away. In fact, she seems to have a knack for reading people. She becomes the ringleader of her group of friends, sensing easily what each kid wants or what will make them happy. Soon, she organizes them to pull off neighborhood events: a family carnival, complete with games and prizes, or a particularly elaborate haunted house for Halloween. These events take weeks of effort, and she’s perfectly at home refining every detail. Yet when the big day comes, she’s not out in the middle of the action, howling at the puppet show or running from game to game. Instead, she stays on the edges. There are just too many people, too many emotions, too much laughing and shouting and winning and losing. Her own carnival overwhelms her.It’s not the only time she gets overstimulated. She has to modify her clothes, cutting off straps so the fabric doesn’t rub her skin (when she was a baby, her mom recalls, they had to cut the feet off her footed sleepers, too). In the summer, she’s excited to go to a week-long camp, but her mom has to drive her home early; she can’t sleep in a crowded bunk, let alone one crackling with the feelings and intrigues of a dozen little girls. These reactions surprise and disappoint people, and their reactions in turn surprise and disappoint the girl. For her parents, her behavior is a cause of worry: what if she can’t handle the real world? Still, her mom does her best to encourage her, and her dad reminds her she has to say things out loud rather than just thinking them in her head. But she has a lot of thoughts—libraries of them—and people rarely understand them. She is called many things, sometimes even sensitive, but it’s not always a good thing. It’s something to be fixed.No one calls the boy sensitive. They do call him gifted when he reads and writes above his grade level, and he eventually gets permission to spend lunch hours in the school library—it frees him from the roar of the lunchroom, and it’s less alarming than a drainpipe. His peers have other words for him. They call him weird. Or that worst-of-all word, wuss. It doesn’t help that he can never hide his big feelings, that he sometimes cries at school, and that he breaks down when he sees bullying—even if he’s not the victim.But as he grows older, he increasingly is. The other boys have little respect for the dreamy kid who prefers a walk in a forest over a football game, who writes novels instead of coming to parties. And he has no interest in vying for their approval. It costs him: He gets shoved in hallways and mocked at lunch, and gym class may as well be a firing squad. He is seen as so soft, so weak that an older girl becomes his biggest bully, laughing as she writes obscenities on his shirt with a marker. He cannot admit any of this to his parents, least of all his dad, who told him the way to handle a bully is to punch the person in the face. The boy has never punched anyone.Both the girl and the boy, in their separate lives, start to feel as if there is no one else like them in the world. And both seek a way out. For the girl, the solution is to withdraw. By high school, each day overwhelms her, and she comes home so fatigued that she hides in her room from her friends. She often stays home sick, and though her parents are nice about it, she wonders if they worry about her. For the boy, the way out is to learn to act tough.