Quiet (23 page)

At first I wondered why I prized these reassurances so highly. Then I realized that I was attending the workshop because I wanted to stretch myself to the outer limits of my temperament. I wanted to be the best and bravest speaker I could be. The reassurances were evidence that I was on my way toward achieving this goal. I suspected that the feedback I was getting was overly charitable, but I didn't care. What mattered was that I'd addressed an audience that had received me well, and I felt good about the experience. I had begun to desensitize myself to the horrors of public speaking.

Since then, I've done plenty of speaking, to groups of ten and crowds of hundreds. I've come to embrace the power of the podium. For me this involves taking specific steps, including treating every speech as a creative project, so that when I get ready for the big day, I experience that delving-deep sensation I enjoy so much. I also speak on topics that matter to me deeply, and have found that I feel much more centered when I truly care about my subject.

This isn't always possible, of course. Sometimes speakers need to talk about subjects that don't interest them much, especially at work. I believe this is harder for introverts, who have trouble projecting artificial enthusiasm. But there's a hidden advantage to this inflexibility: it can motivate us to make tough but worthwhile career changes if we find ourselves compelled to speak too often about topics that leave us cold. There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.

Easter Sunday, 1939. The Lincoln Memorial. Marian Anderson, one of the most extraordinary singers of her generation, takes the stage, the statue of the sixteenth president rising up behind her. A regal woman with toffee-colored skin, she gazes at her audience of 75,000: men in brimmed hats, ladies in their Sunday best, a great sea of black and white faces. “My country 'tis of thee,” she begins, her voice soaring, each word pure and distinct. “Sweet land of liberty.” The crowd is rapt and tearful. They never thought this day would come to pass.

And it wouldn't have, without Eleanor Roosevelt. Earlier that year, Anderson had planned to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., but the Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned the hall, rejected her because of her race. Eleanor Roosevelt, whose family had fought in the Revolution, resigned from the DAR, helped arrange for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial—and ignited a national
firestorm. Roosevelt was not the only one to protest, but she brought political clout to the issue, risking her own reputation in the process.

For Roosevelt, who seemed constitutionally unable to look away from other people's troubles, such acts of social conscience were nothing unusual. But others appreciated how remarkable they were. “
This was something unique,” recalled the African-American civil rights leader James Farmer of Roosevelt's brave stand. “Franklin was a politician. He weighed the political consequences of every step that he took. He was a good politician, too. But Eleanor spoke out of conscience, and acted as a conscientious person. That was different.”

It was a role she played throughout their life together: Franklin's adviser, Franklin's conscience. He may have chosen her for just this reason; in other ways they were such an unlikely pair.

They met when he was twenty. Franklin was her distant cousin, a sheltered Harvard senior from an upper-crust family. Eleanor was only nineteen, also from a moneyed clan, but she had chosen to immerse herself in the sufferings of the poor, despite her family's disapproval. As a volunteer at a settlement house on Manhattan's impoverished Lower East Side, she had met children who were forced to sew artificial flowers in windowless factories to the point of exhaustion. She took Franklin with her one day. He couldn't believe that human beings lived in such miserable conditions—or that a young woman of his own class had been the one to open his eyes to this side of America. He promptly fell in love with her.

But Eleanor wasn't the light, witty type he'd been expected to marry. Just the opposite: she was slow to laugh, bored by small talk, serious-minded, shy. Her mother, a fine-boned, vivacious aristocrat, had nicknamed her “Granny” because of her demeanor. Her father, the charming and popular younger brother of Theodore Roosevelt, doted on her when he saw her, but he was drunk most of the time, and died when Eleanor was nine. By the time Eleanor met Franklin, she couldn't believe that someone like
him
would be interested in
her
. Franklin was everything that she was not: bold and buoyant, with a wide, irrepressible grin, as easy with people as she was cautious. “He was young and gay and good looking,” Eleanor recalled, “and I was shy and awkward and thrilled when he asked me to dance.”

At the same time, many told Eleanor that Franklin wasn't good enough for her. Some saw him as a lightweight, a mediocre scholar, a frivolous man-about-town. And however poor Eleanor's own self-image, she did not lack for admirers who appreciated her gravitas. Some of her suitors wrote grudging letters of congratulations to Franklin when he won her hand. “I have more respect and admiration for Eleanor than any girl I have ever met,” one letter-writer said. “You are mighty lucky. Your future wife is such as it is the privilege of few men to have,” said another.

But public opinion was beside the point for Franklin and Eleanor. Each had strengths that the other craved—her empathy, his bravado. “E is an Angel,” Franklin wrote in his journal. When she accepted his marriage proposal in 1903, he proclaimed himself the happiest man alive. She responded with a flood of love letters. They were married in 1905 and went on to have six children.

Despite the excitement of their courtship, their differences caused trouble from the start. Eleanor craved intimacy and weighty conversations; he loved parties, flirting, and gossip. The man who would declare that he had nothing to fear but fear itself could not understand his wife's struggles with shyness. When Franklin was appointed assistant secretary of the navy in 1913, the pace of his social life grew ever more frenzied and the settings more gilded—elite private clubs, his Harvard friends' mansions. He caroused later and later into the night. Eleanor went home earlier and earlier.

In the meantime, Eleanor found herself with a full calendar of social duties. She was expected to pay visits to the wives of other Washington luminaries, leaving calling cards at their doors and holding open houses in her own home. She didn't relish this role, so she hired a social secretary named Lucy Mercer to help her. Which seemed a good idea—until the summer of 1917, when Eleanor took the children to Maine for the summer, leaving Franklin behind in Washington with Mercer. The two began a lifelong affair. Lucy was just the kind of lively beauty Franklin had been expected to marry in the first place.

Eleanor found out about Franklin's betrayal when she stumbled on a packet of love letters in his suitcase. She was devastated, but stayed in the marriage. And although they never rekindled the romantic side of
their relationship, she and Franklin replaced it with something formidable: a union of his confidence with her conscience.

Fast-forward to our own time, where we'll meet another woman of similar temperament, acting out of her own sense of conscience. Dr. Elaine Aron is a research psychologist who, since
her first scientific publication in 1997, has singlehandedly reframed what Jerome Kagan and others call high reactivity (and sometimes “negativity” or “inhibition”). She calls it “sensitivity,” and along with her new name for the trait, she's transformed and deepened our understanding of it.

When I hear that Aron will be the keynote speaker at an annual weekend gathering of “highly sensitive people” at Walker Creek Ranch in Marin County, California, I quickly buy plane tickets. Jacquelyn Strickland, a psychotherapist and the founder and host of the event, explains that she created these weekends so that sensitive people could benefit from being in one another's presence. She sends me an agenda explaining that we'll be sleeping in rooms designated for “napping, journaling, puttering, meditating, organizing, writing, and reflecting.”

“Please do socialize very quietly in your room (with consent of your roommate), or preferably in the group areas on walks and at mealtimes,” says the agenda. The conference is geared to people who enjoy meaningful discussions and sometimes “move a conversation to a deeper level, only to find out we are the only ones there.” There will be plenty of time for serious talk this weekend, we're assured. But we'll also be free to come and go as we please. Strickland knows that most of us will have weathered a lifetime of mandatory group activities, and she wants to show us a different model, if only for a few days.

Walker Creek Ranch sits on 1,741 acres of unspoiled Northern California wilderness. It offers hiking trails and wildlife and vast crystalline skies, but at its center is a cozy, barnlike conference center where about thirty of us gather on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of June. The
Buckeye Lodge is outfitted with grey industrial carpets, large whiteboards, and picture windows overlooking sunny redwood forests. Alongside the usual piles of registration forms and name badges, there's a flip chart where we're asked to write our name and Myers-Briggs personality type. I scan the list. Everyone's an introvert except for Strickland, who is warm, welcoming, and expressive. (According to Aron's research, the majority, though not all, of sensitive people are introverts.)

The tables and chairs in the room are organized in a big square so that we can all sit and face one another. Strickland invites us—participation optional—to share what brought us here. A software engineer named Tom kicks off, describing with great passion his relief at learning that there was “a physiological basis for the trait of sensitivity. Here's the research! This is how I am! I don't have to try to meet anyone's expectations anymore. I don't need to feel apologetic or defensive in any way.” With his long, narrow face, brown hair, and matching beard, Tom reminds me of Abraham Lincoln. He introduces his wife, who talks about how compatible she and Tom are, and how together they stumbled across Aron's work.

When it's my turn, I talk about how I've never been in a group environment in which I didn't feel obliged to present an unnaturally rah-rah version of myself. I say that I'm interested in the connection between introversion and sensitivity. Many people nod.

On Saturday morning, Dr. Aron appears in the Buckeye Lodge. She waits playfully behind an easel containing a flip chart while Strickland introduces her to the audience. Then she emerges smiling—ta-da!—from behind the easel, sensibly clad in a blazer, turtleneck, and corduroy skirt. She has short, feathery brown hair and warm, crinkly blue eyes that look as if they don't miss a thing. You can see immediately the dignified scholar Aron is today, as well as the awkward schoolgirl she must once have been. You can see, too, her respect for her audience.

Getting right down to business, she informs us that she has five different subtopics she can discuss, and asks us to raise our hands to vote for our first, second, and third choice of subjects. Then she performs, rapid-fire, an elaborate mathematical calculation from which she determines the three subtopics for which we've collectively voted. The crowd settles down amiably. It doesn't really matter which subtopics we've
chosen; we know that Aron is here to talk about sensitivity, and that she's taking our preferences into consideration.

Some psychologists make their mark by doing unusual research experiments. Aron's contribution is to think differently, radically differently, about studies that others have done.
When she was a girl, Aron was often told that she was “too sensitive for her own good.” She had two hardy elder siblings and was the only child in her family who liked to daydream, and play inside, and whose feelings were easily hurt. As she grew older and ventured outside her family's orbit, she continued to notice things about herself that seemed different from the norm. She could drive alone for hours and never turn on the radio. She had strong, sometimes disturbing dreams at night. She was “strangely intense,” and often beset by powerful emotions, both positive and negative. She had trouble finding the sacred in the everyday; it seemed to be there only when she withdrew from the world.

Aron grew up, became a psychologist, and married a robust man who loved these qualities. To her husband, Art, Aron was creative, intuitive, and a deep thinker. She appreciated these things in herself, too, but saw them as “acceptable surface manifestations of a terrible, hidden flaw I had been aware of all my life.” She thought it was a miracle that Art loved her in spite of this flaw.