Thin-skinned

Sensitivity is a word that moves in contradictory ways. If Tim (to pluck a name from the air) is sensitive, he may be careful about his own feelings or about someone else's feelings. Tim cannot perform both tasks of attention. 

I have a private set of beliefs about how people should treat me. If a person (Melody, to pluck another name from the aether) breaks Rule 3--it hurts when two other people leave the table and leave me behind alone--I experience that broken rule as Melody's insensitivity. I give Melody the agency to hurt me in ways I secretly define as insensitive. I'm on the lookout for Melody's cruel intentions. This requires a second belief, that I can determine why Melody would leave me sitting alone. 

Through power of my tacit belief system, I managed to isolate myself in an attempt to keep other people from hurting me so much. My self-quarantine blinded me to the feelings of everyone else. And my ability to intellectualize everything rests on something even more fundamental: I patrol a border between what I think and what I feel, a dichotomy constructed very early in my life. 

I'm still the 5-year-old cryer standing by the swing set with sand on the front of her sailor dress, waiting for her turn. I still want that moment of a bird-like freedom when it feels like I just might swing into the clear blue sky. Instead, I will fall back, feet plowing furrows in the sand, dirty hands held out in anticipation of being pushed off the swing again.