On the Intersection of Barbie and Rick Rubin

Or, Thoughts on Being Sensitive

I don’t really remember playing with Barbie as a child. I’m sure I must have had one. After all, it was almost impossible to grow up in the 1970s without one, even if you were the daughter of a daughter of Sicilian immigrants—a woman who detested peanut butter, never gave you milk to drink, and would rather have gone without pasta than eat a vegetable from a can. In other words, my mother, even if not a staunch feminist, had a fierce resistance to much of American culture, so a Barbie in my household was not a foregone conclusion. Regardless, surely I played with Barbies—if not at my house, then at a friend’s, or a cousin’s—but not in a way that built a lasting memory.

As a new mom with almost a decade of women’s studies syllabi behind me, I hated the idea of Barbie for my children. And yet, one Christmas Eve around 2010, my then-husband and I overheard our six-year-old daughter say the only thing she asked Santa for (don’t get me started on my poor decision-making around Santa) was a Barbie something-or-other. He and I exchanged panicked glances. Did you know that was what she wanted??? we silently accused each other with our eyes. Later that night, after setting out milk and cookies and carrots, corralling four kids under ten into their pajamas and into their beds, then waiting until they fell asleep, there was nothing else to do except hop in the car and hightail it to Walmart. (Mistakes just keep piling up. Consumerism at its worst.) At the stroke of midnight, I ran up and down the aisles with too many other harried parents of young children until I found this Barbie whatchamacallit that she wanted. (So much for principles.) My memory ends there. I don’t remember that she did or didn’t play with it. (She says she did, and loved it.)

As I wrote in my last post, I was conflicted about seeing the movie. My daughters were interested, and I was definitely curious about what Greta Gerwig would do. Additionally, even before the pandemic, we had never been a regular movie-in-the-theater type of family, so the rare occasion when we all wanted to see the same film felt like a call to act. So, we went, despite my growing hesitations about its overt consumerism (I hated that even our three tickets were going to Mattel’s bottom line) and the contradiction (I linked to this not once but TWICE last week; please read it!) between the feminism the movie purports to preach and the slew of time-tested, pervasive, patriarchal beauty ideals it’s very aggressively affirming.

On balance (no real spoilers, but proceed cautiously if necessary), we found the movie mostly boring. I thought the jokes aimed at straight, white-dude culture were pretty funny, if only because they were so true. “What?!? You’re never seen The Godfather!?!” All the guitar playing, the send-up of Monty Python, Matchbox Twenty, the appropriation of Spanish. The fact that these jokes have been told before in a zillion ways is kind of depressing, honestly, but they did make me laugh. Besides that, though, the movie overall felt a little bit like a High School Musical installment to me (albeit with more high-brow references): there were the carefully curated outfits, flashy song and dance numbers, and dialogue that managed to be both vacuous and relevant all at the same time.

But then this: there came a moment where I, as a viewer, felt connected to the art I was watching. It happened about one-third (?) of the way into the movie, when Barbie experiences full-on human emotions for the first time. While searching online to see if I could find a clip of this particular scene (I couldn’t), I learned that one of the scenes getting the most praise is the one when Barbie sits on a bench next to a woman who appears to be in her eighties or nineties. Barbie tells the woman she is beautiful, and the woman responds with “I know,” which, in turn, makes Barbie cry happy tears. (Honestly, that scene did nothing for me; it felt disingenuous, or maybe gratuitous, but I suppose that could be my own self-loathing coming out. 🙃) At any rate, the scene immediately before that is the one I’m referring to. It’s a montage of Barbie sitting still (for most of the movie, she’s very much in action) and observing all the humans around her—some of them are arguing, others are making out, or smiling, or laughing, or weeping. In short, Barbie observes the emotional states of others. And not only does she observe them, she FEELS them. And I’ll give Margot Robbie this: sitting in a dark movie theater, next to my daughters, otherwise slightly bored and annoyed that I had spent money to be there, I believed Barbie.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

I believed Barbie because I saw myself sitting on that bench.

Most days, I walk around feeling like an open channel. If there is pain to be felt—mine, or someone else’s—I feel it. Frequently, it threatens to swamp me. Watching a human try to sleep in a doorway, overhearing a parent shame a child in a grocery cart, being surprised by Bach when Spotify opens unexpectedly as I get in the car. Whether it pains or thrills me, I feel it, and sometimes the pain and thrill arrive as one reaction, inextricably intertwined. Sometimes I am so despondent I walk around all day with fresh tears streaming; other times, I buzz with an alertness, a joy of indeterminate causes, that causes me to skip across the room or spin myself in circles, cackling wildly. As a child, I made my mother stop singing this lullaby because I couldn’t handle the pain of Kathleen’s inevitable demise. I cried when Jackie Paper abandoned Puff even if I did love hearing my father play guitar. I ran from the movie theater when the villain in Raiders of the Lost Ark was mauled by the propellers, in spite of not wanting to look weak in front of my older cousins.

There’s a passage in Celeste Ng’s new novel, Our Missing Hearts, that speaks to this same experience. Here, the narrator is describing the hero, Bird:

How porous the boundary was between him and the world, as if everything flowed through him like water through a net…a tender bare heart, beating out in the open where anything could cause a bruise.

Do you need a minute to reread that passage? To take a breath? Because I did.

If you type “highly sensitive person,” into your search bar, you’ll get about 399,000,000 results in 0.52 seconds. Depending on who you are and what your worldview is, HSP, as it was first coined in 1996 and is now called by those-in-the-know, is either an asset or a liability, a neurodivergent trait or a made-up phenomenon. In the self-help zeitgeist of today, the rallying cry goes something like this: the ability to feel our emotions is a superpower that far too many of us have been taught to ignore, or to discredit. And, sure, like most women my age (of any age??), if I tried to count the number of times I was told I was “too sensitive,” “over reacting,” or “taking things too seriously,” I wouldn’t stop until someone tossed the first clod of dirt on my grave. (Just kidding. I want to be cremated. Or upcycled into a tree.) Calling women hysterical has been a trope for so long, how on earth can one woman ever unpack what is inherently her own personality vs what is the impact of thousands of years of patriarchal messaging and subjugation? (Asking for a friend.) (Also, spoiler alert: it’s not an either / or proposition.) Conversely, no one I know will argue against the idea that the ways in which telling boys and men to “man up” does a disservice to us all. Clearly, we’ve got all got a lot of unpacking to do.

But today I’m less interested in (okay, slightly less interested in) the politics of being sensitive than I am in my own experience of being sensitive (because I’m ultimately here to figure myself out). So, back to Barbie. There she was, that doll-in-the-process-of-becoming-human, being sensitive, receiving the pain and the beauty that surrounds her, and even though she didn’t have cells, not yet, I believe that Barbie felt those emotions on a cellular level, felt them flow through her with little or no boundary between the source and her own experience of them. THAT was the moment in the film I recognized myself. That was the moment I thought, Oh, yes! There is my experience reflected back to me.

Which brings me to Rick Rubin. In his book The Creative Act, Rubin addresses this “sensitivity” as it relates to artists. In general, Rubin’s approach to the creative life is one that requires the maker to be open to the art that exists all around us—in one another, in the natural world, in our lived and unlived experiences, and in our own bodies. In other words, making art requires artists to be at least somewhat more “porous” (to use Ng’s word) than someone who isn’t interested in creating anything. And sometimes that porousness is burdensome:

Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves. They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more. They feel everything more deeply.

One of the reasons so many great artists die of overdoes early in their lives is because they’re using drugs to numb a very painful existence. The reason it’s painful is the reason they became artists in the first place: their incredible sensitivity.

If you see tremendous beauty or tremendous pain where other people see little or nothing at all, you’re confronted with big feelings all the time…. When those around you don’t see what you see and don’t feel what you feel, this can lead to a sense of isolation and a general feeling of not belonging, of otherness…. These charged emotions, powerful when expressed in the work, are the same dark clouds that beg to be numbed to allow sleep or to get out of bed and face the day…. It’s a blessing and a curse.

Just as I saw myself in Margot Robbie’s Barbie, and in Celeste Ng’s Bird, I see myself in these words of Rubin’s. Yes, I often feel lonely as a result of my big feelings. Yes, I spend an awful lot of time trying to explain my seemingly outsized reactions. And, to Rubin’s point, my writing (in all / any iteration—these blogs, other essays, my poetry, letters to lovers, journal entries, texts to my kids and friends, my copious to-do lists) almost always do feel like a form of protection. (If I can craft my experience into something tangible, it becomes somewhat less spiky.) I write as a way to cope not only with the pain but also with the beauty and abundance of my world, which can sometimes be even more destabilizing than the pain.

Another big theme throughout Rubin’s book is the reminder for all of us to pay attention when the universe sends us similar signals across different avenues. He calls it “Source,” Mary Oliver calls it “the muse,” Elizabeth Gilbert calls it “magic—the supernatural, the mystical, the inexplicable, the surreal, the divine, the transcendent, the otherworldly.” In one week, Source has sent me A LOT of messages about being a sensitive person. By extension, that also means Source has sent me a lot of messages about being an artist, and a woman, and a woman who is an artist. So, here I am. I’m paying attention.

I don’t know what it means yet, but I am paying attention, staying open to it, and documenting it here, with you. Thank you for being here. xoxo