I worked in business for ten years, and for part of it, I did sales. I did sales like a rat. I did sales like a slime worm begging for trash food. I was meek and embarrassed and acutely aware of the shittiness of me, taking up time in that other person’s day, trying to sell them something I wasn’t actually sure they needed or wanted. A thought plagued me: how many of us really, foundationally, in work or in life, need another piece of software? In any given day doing sales, I would have gladly traded my position at the desk for a bad flu that would force me into bed. Nothing I can do about a flu, that heavy fatigue that prohibits participation in the world. That merciful bubble of incapacitation. For years I wondered why I couldn’t just do sales and be fine. Wondered at my profound malfunction.

~

The severity of my issue was confirmed by the book Learned Optimism, a national bestseller, which elevates the optimistic worldview above any other, like so many advice books these days. I read it in my twenties when my self was still an open question. Optimists, the book relays via studies and tests and many anecdotes, are happier and better at everything (this was my impression reading the book, at least), and most concretely, optimists are better salespeople. This is because they believe things will work out, and therefore can bounce back in the face of adversity, like when the person on the other line yells Stop-fucking-calling-me-at-dinnertime. In this case an optimist, and only an optimist, can rally to pick up that phone again and make another call. I’m simplifying here, but so does the book. If you self-identify as an optimist, that book must be like cocaine. Reading it must make you feel right and powerful, both intoxicating sensations. So I understand why optimists would like the book; everybody wants to rule the world.

~

My character is a laser, trying to pierce everything; my character is a permeable membrane, everything piercing me. I hear a story thirdhand about a fifty-something man who was laid off. On the call with HR, when they gave him instructions for returning his laptop, he started crying. On hearing this, I cry. I recently learned the concept of depressive realism: if you are depressed, you see the world more accurately. If you see the world accurately, the only reasonable reaction is to become consumed with sadness.

~

If you’re not an optimist and reading Learned Optimism, you have some options. You can feel like shit. Or you can commit yourself to doing the many exercises the book provides to learn optimism. Or you can be bitter. Or you can try to forget about the whole thing. I did all of these, serially. It is hard to read a book by an expert containing a bunch of evidence that your character is inherently suboptimal, so it seems natural that, after reading, I disliked and therefore wanted to change myself. To become an optimist. And a better salesperson. To feel less like I’m always almost drowning in the world.

~

Whenever I swim laps, water gets lodged deep in my ears and stays there for a day or more. It must be the geometry of my ear canals, thin and long; trapping. For at least twenty-four hours after a swim, the volume of my life is turned down. Sitting across from someone at dinner, I can’t hear them exactly. I can hear them generally, like a wave or a breeze, not exactly like a podcast or a sales pitch. That watery softness is something I don’t mind, I’ve found; it’s a surprising comfort. All those needles that are always poking me are turned briefly to Q-tips. I can’t really engage much after a swim. I nod softly in response to nothing specific, to everything. There’s a room where the light won’t find you. Sometimes I need that room.

~

In my thirties, I stumbled across a description of Highly Sensitive People, “HSPs,” and felt a shock of recognition. HSPs are more sensitive to everything: light, sound, violence in movies, sensations on the skin, other people’s feelings, insults, someone yelling at you on the phone Stop-fucking-calling-me-at-dinnertime. HSPs have a specific, measurable set of genetic variations (so what I’m saying is, it’s real, I’m almost sure), and are thought to make up about twenty percent of the human population. Such extra-sensitive individuals have been identified in over one hundred other species, suggesting that there’s a reason a segment of a population might evolve this way. So it’s sort of normal, but also very much not. I’ve seen it described as “not rare enough to be a disability, but not common enough to be widely understood.” Twenty percent of the human population is a lot, though. I’m shocked to only learn of this well into my thirties, being one myself. I suppose HSPs weren’t featured on the magazine covers of my youth.

~

I often feel other people’s feelings. I can sense who is uncomfortable and who knows herself and who is frustrated with whom. We all can do this to some extent, but for me the emotions are like gusts on my face, horns blaring. I remember the sales meeting where I first knew that the person on the other side of the table disliked our product, even though he said “cool” and “awesome.” I thought everyone knew it, but afterward I found that others on my team thought the meeting had gone well. I was right, it hadn’t. Research on HSPs shows that we tend to have more activity in the insula, a part of the brain that “integrates moment-to-moment knowledge of inner states and emotions, bodily position, and outer events.” So we have a Spidey-Sense, you could say, a superpower. This would be my favored interpretation of the HSP experience. I love an opportunity to feel like my character is intrinsically, biologically better.

~

But I don’t want to tell you that my way is the best way to live. I’m very careful about that. There’s a downside to this type of living (and what type of pessimist would I be if I didn’t point this out?). That meeting was a black hole for my energy. There I sat, struggling against the current of disinterest and boredom from the other side of the table, any sense of gladness and well-being sucked out of me as if by a Dementor. In a research study that gave HSPs and non-HSPs a series of tasks, HSPs did the tasks more quickly and accurately, but were more stressed afterwards. Yes, that seems right. “Useful but exhausting” is a phrase I have read in the HSP literature.

“The biggest cost of being highly sensitive,” writes researcher Elaine Aaron, who coined the term HSP in the nineties, “is that our nervous systems can become overloaded.” That, in my opinion, is an understatement.

~

I saw a new primary care doctor and decided to be honest about everything. I usually am not, not with a new doctor, not someone who I will see for thirteen minutes. But for her, I decided to go there. I craved a caregiver who actually knew my medical history, so I ran the lifetime highlights of drama and shame. The years of obsessive thoughts about sticking forks in outlets; the years of mysterious rashes and daily diarrhea; the years of panic attacks on Sundays; the years of chronic foot pain; the resulting years of depression; and so on. She listened to my list of confessions and, noting her slightly raised eyebrow, I regretted my decision to share even before I was done talking. I felt no sense of relief, and instead I had managed to make the exam room feel even bleaker, the fluorescent lights even more violently bright. She looked at me appraisingly, my body presenting so normal, so healthy-looking, my voice barely even wavering as I listed these horrors.

“Seems like you are doing pretty well,” she said, “all things considered.”

Minutes later I stood on the sidewalk in the sun, crying, squinting to block out the brightness. I have sensitive eyes.

Pretty well, all things considered.

Pretty well.

​​​​​​I didn’t like it as the final characterization of “how I’m doing.” Pretty well. Harsh. All things considered. Had she, in that short time, considered all things? That’s huge. More than I have been able to achieve.

~

Come to think of it, the project of considering all things, that’s actually what I do. That’s actually what I’m good at. It’s awful sometimes. And rich. Life won’t be boring, that’s for sure.

~

Depressive realists are prone to consider the death of everyone, and the response—depression—makes the utmost sense. “It is a fearful knowledge,” James Baldwin wrote, “that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you. Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error.” I read this quotation and cry (we see a pattern emerging). That’s something I often feel, all at once: all my pain and error.

~

For example. Once, when I was a businesswoman, I went to lunch with an important man. I had a busy day leading up to the lunch, and so I didn’t do much preparation (which I normally would have done. But it was just a lunch, not a presentation, I need you to know I am usually prepared). Within minutes of sitting down, this man mentioned two people I knew, and I indicated off-handedly, and with surely the most casual, positive tone, that I had no idea he was connected with them. What a coincidence! He looked down at me from across the table.

“Do you even know who I am?” he asked.

Unsure how to answer the question, I said, “No, I guess?”

He looked me in the eye and said, “Here’s a tip. Before meetings, do your research.”

I morphed in that moment into the basest creature on earth, the most stupid, the most nobody, the most failed, horrible, stinking puddle of worthlessness. This interaction continues to live in me. It arrives unbidden in my mind at least twice a month, five years later, ten years later, a hot air balloon loaded with a grenade, floating into my mind carrying all the shame I ever felt about my shitty lack of preparedness for everything. It is beside the point that no one close to me would ever describe me as “unprepared.” One characteristic of HSPs is that we can become fixated on our past mistakes. Research suggests that, as a result of this fixation, we are less likely to make them again.

~

You can decide if that trade-off is worthwhile. Or maybe it doesn’t matter, worthwhile or not, we are who we are. I regularly recall that moment with that important man, and I know again, viscerally, for certain, that I have never done and will never do anything right in my life. An optimist, of course, would not be plagued this way. Is there a place in this world, then, for a highly sensitive businesswoman?

~

Sensitive. Another way to put it: attuned. That sounds nicer. It’s possible to read about highly sensitive people and come away with the impression that we are mildly disabled. It’s also possible to read about HSPs and conclude that we are indispensable, an evolutionary advantage for humanity. Humanity needs the sensitives to throw up the warning flags for the human race. Things around here are going downhill—the climate, homelessness, animal cruelty, the hardness and meanness—and the sensitives are crying, to the benefit of everyone.

We are nudging close to the interesting core: Which of us are valuable? The optimists? The sensitives? Learned Optimism proclaims confidently that optimists are most valuable to humanity, and acknowledges with the tone of a footnote that actually pessimists are important too. We need them for departments like accounting and legal. One reads this and hears the lameness of those roles, foonf. Sure, the human race needs such people—the warning people, the risk-attuned people. But you don’t want to be one. No, no.

But for some people, you are one. Then what?

~

Sensitivity, pessimism, and depressive realism are different concepts, but within my own self they feel highly related. That is helpful for me to acknowledge as I consider this bundle against the character traits of being thick-skinned and optimistic. I think no one—few—would look at the two options and say That first role is objectively the more fun. If I were a neutral pre-human looking at the two options, not knowing in which role I would land, I find it hard to imagine electing to occupy the role of the sensitive pessimist. Not in America, not today. Even me, knowing what is gained in the details and the heightened sensations and even the existential sadness, even loving what I have gained from it, even sometimes, against all odds, against the cultural zeitgeist of positivity, feeling secretly proud of my little sensitive role, of my ability to know better, more quickly, more accurately the needs of others, of my command of the details and my bouts of depressive realism and my sense that I have the ability to experience the world more fully because of the attention I pay . . . even I would choose the other role. Given the option at the outset. Given a blank slate. It does seem easier. But now that I’m here, I wouldn’t give up my powers. You see, it’s complicated.

~

The concept of depressive realism has come under scrutiny recently. The researchers who came up with the term forty years ago conducted a study in which college students pressed a button that lit up randomly and were then asked how much control they had over the light. The depressed students more accurately reported no control. Such people, concluded the authors, are Sadder but Wiser. A recent study attempted to replicate the results, bringing in a new set of depressed and non-depressed college students to operate a new set of flashing buttons, and found that this time the depressed were no more accurate in their perception of control. The result caused somewhat of an uproar in that corner of psychiatric research. The original authors criticized the new study for failing to exactly replicate the original work. The new authors criticized the psychiatric community for so fully and deeply adopting the unproven Sadder but Wiser hypothesis over the past forty years. Everybody wants to rule the world. One psychologist said in an interview, of Sadder but Wiser, “this is a classic finding that I really want to be true, and many people do—it gives the Eeyores in all of us a little hope.”

It’s remarkable how absolutely inconsequential the college students and light-up buttons seem to me, how little relevance those results seem to have when it is my own mind being described. So some college students did some stuff with buttons. Results notwithstanding, I’m sure that I can see to the heart of things better than most. And I’m a worse salesperson. In any case, I’d prefer not to think of myself as an Eeyore, but if I must, then I’ll try and grasp at something larger than “a little hope.” Something like genuine self-respect, or even self-admiration. Or even admiration from others. Like the optimists have. So that’s what we’re doing here.

~

I’ve been listening to three different covers of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Artists all over are drawn to that song, it seems. I print off the music and go to the keyboard and bang out clumsy chords recalled from my childhood piano lessons, and I sing “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” It’s an ugly sound, because I’m not a skilled singer, but to sing at all feels powerful. “There’s a room where the light won’t find you,” I sing with crappy breath support and artless tone. Something about this whole scene is quite beautiful. Something about it I wouldn’t want to lose. I do remember one glinting doubt I had about Learned Optimism, even when I read it in my twenties: would it really be that appealing to live in a world populated entirely by excellent salespeople?

~

I sit in a chair in the yard as the morning fog burns off. I take off my glasses, everything from ten feet out blurs, and suddenly a million previously invisible droplets show themselves. All at once the droplets are the only physical matter at the correct depth for my natural focal range, and they suddenly comprise my whole world. The parade of tiny water is shocking, sparkling, enormous. This is about as much as I can take, these million shining droplets, so how could I possibly survive a corporate office?

~

I cried on a work call once, when I was twenty-four. My project had gotten killed, and a senior partner at McKinsey & Company was telling me that I’d mismanaged the project, gotten off track. “Where did this idea even come from,” he said loudly. “I don’t know how this went so sideways.” I was crying, but he didn’t know it. Mercifully, he only could hear a cracking voice, wavering, softness. We hung up and I cried for real, with loud sobs. A junior partner called me back then, and I slammed the brakes on my tears, gulped air, picked up. He’d listened to the conversation just now and had something to tell me. “Geoff doesn’t like emotional people,” he advised. Well, I see. Geoff. Geoff has some preferences. That surely was a red flag, so many years before I extricated myself. The logic is so simple, and yet I didn’t connect the dots: Geoff doesn’t like emotional people; I am an emotional person; therefore, Geoff doesn’t like me. This incident is very important to me now because it lays bare a foundational truth of my life: in that world, the world I inhabited for over a decade, it is completely okay for someone to call me and tell me Geoff doesn’t like emotional people, or rather, with minimal logical leaps, Geoff doesn’t like you. It’s one hundred percent fine for Geoff to blanket dislike emotional people, the way it’s totally fine these days to casually dislike nagging women and pessimistic accountants. Also, in that world, it doesn’t matter at all how I feel about, say, unkind people.

~

It seems very final, given all this, that I can never belong in the places where power is gained and spent. I can operate there at great personal expense but can never belong. All things considered. The question I am trying to answer, then, is if Geoff doesn’t like me, can I like me? I must say, the signal I’m getting through the noise is, You? The depressive realist? The highly sensitive person? The crier? The worrier? The planner? All things considered? Not entirely likable. Perhaps there is something else you could learn: optimism, perhaps.

~

That is how it has felt for so long. Only recently has something been shifting. Only now, only in glimmers, only when my ears are clogged and my glasses are off and the world is just waves of sound and glittering droplets, only alone and only in moments when the shame of those years has receded for a while—only then do I sometimes think, considering the Geoffs of the world: Do you even know who I am? I can feel the world, I tell myself in a powerful whisper, in ways I suspect Geoff never will. I can see secrets. Sometimes I’ll spit out a truth that is so ice-cold and well-chiseled and real that it will send a shiver through you. Come into the ring on my terms.

But now here I am, falling into that very tempting trap, elevating my own way of being at the expense of Geoff ’s, just like everyone these days. Everybody wants to rule the world. It’s just that the hyper-sensitive pessimistic depressive realists have never even come close. So, I think, with minimal risk of world domination, I can attempt here to give us a little boost.