I’ll keep my gooey little heart
A little sense, and a lot of sensitivity
You hurt my feelings and it caught me by surprise. I can’t tell if you cared too little or I cared too much, but I fell in the gap.
When I was seven years old, a school teacher told me I was too sensitive. She said I had to toughen up. I can’t remember what I was upset about, but I remember her less-than-consoling words. Like a kick when you’re down. I didn’t tell anyone.
Being “sensitive” was labeled as bad. I didn’t understand it any more than I controlled it back then. I just understood it was something to hide. There’s a line in a favorite movie of mine where one, very cynical character, turns to the main character (a hopeless romantic type) and she says “Put some armor around that gooey little heart.” Whenever I see it, I think of my primary school teacher.
Beloved characters aside, whether we want it to or not, some armor does go up. Every experience we have takes a stand between us and what comes next. The good, the bad, and the in between accumulate like languages we learned, but don’t practice. They take up residence at the back of our minds, only to pop back into our consciousness when something looks like them. Call it armor, call it thick skin, call it stained glass.
I think my shield is more of the stained glass variety. Grains of sand that accumulated and solidified, and got colored, over time. Maybe it doesn’t offer much in the way of defense, but it’s still there to reflect and refract, to filter and bear the brunt of the scratch. If I believed “sensitive” was bad, I might look for a trade up.
The thing about my thin walls is that they color how I see, but also what I put out. This wall that isn’t a wall, this unprotected, gooey little heart, is a big part of why I write, what I write, how I write.
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up”. Pablo Picasso
My hypothesis? I think “the problem” is, at least in part, our relationship to emotions. Sure, imagination is also a part of it. We think “artist” and we think “creative”. Children can be far more imaginative than adults because the limits between fantasy and reality are not so clear-cut when you start out. But in “artist” there is also “expression” and in “expression” there are gooey little hearts that feel the feelings and look for words and colors and sounds to convey them.
You hurt my feelings and it caught me by surprise. I had my colored glasses up, but your indifference was sharp enough to make a crack. I can’t tell if you cared too little or I cared too much, but I won’t take it back.
So I’m a little banged up and you are unscathed. I’ll take the experience and turn it into art. The muse gets fuel from the burns, she loves my losses and my longings, not with cruelty but with wonder: another thing we survived, another mess to make sense of.
I’ll keep my gooey little heart.
