Notes On Tenderness
I hate that word but you'll get it when you read it and that's also probably just a me thing that I should address in therapy
The other night in my writing group I read a sentence aloud:
“Nellie’s holding the olive oil over the pan, carefully tilting it to release only the slightest drop. She’s been on about her hips again.”
Our writing group is one where our teacher will introduce a topic and then give us prompts related to that topic, then we write for a few minutes, share what we wrote, and see where the discussion goes. The topic this time was sentence-level writing—really nitty gritty language stuff—and more specifically, something our teacher called “pleasure bursts” within sentences. A pleasure burst is a little surprising clue to something special contained within an otherwise ordinary collection of words. My favorite writers right now—Lauren Groff, Maggie O’Farrell, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood—all wield pleasure bursts. It’s a choice of word or phrase that makes the reader pause, that causes a sharp intake of breath, that makes a budding writer go, “You can do that?” As in break the rules.
I didn’t realize “She’s been on about her hips again” was a pleasure burst but that’s how the group responded.
“It’s really so tender, that sentence. To notice that about a person. We know right then and there that the narrator cares really deeply for Nellie,” our teacher said. The word tender is what struck me, and then the fact that it struck me is what struck me.
Lately, in my creative work, I’m writing fiction. I studied nonfiction in grad school and I’ve always thought of myself as a memoirist through and through—thought I couldn’t write fiction, actually; used to joke that when I tried everyone ended up dead after three pages—but I’ve gone through a lot and grown a whole bunch since grad school, and everything I read and watch and write lately is more interested in emotional truth than literal truth. The nugget of a feeling as opposed to a literal timeline of what happened.
So, I’m playing with that in my writing group, and the emotional truth in that sentence about Nellie was that I was thinking about a friend who is often hard on herself. She goes on about her hips.
But for the tenderness of that feeling to be picked up on so easily? I was suddenly filled with the awareness that I am capable of tenderness—I am tender—because that’s what it meant. Why did my capacity for tenderness surprise me the way it did? That, dear reader, probably has to do with what I keep butting up against as my Achilles heel: low self-esteem. I, like my character of Nellie, am very hard on myself. I’ve been told this by employers, loved ones, and friends, and I’ve never quite understood what they meant. Aren’t I just striving for success, to be the best version of myself I can be, to get the job done and do the right thing? Isn’t that high self-esteem? Isn’t noticing a friend caring too much about her hips, being hard on herself—isn’t that just what happens? What people do?
Please don’t take this train of thought as me seeking congratulations for being tender, that’s not my point at all. What I’m trying to say is that I realized, when I was called tender, that I had thought myself…not incapable of that basic human emotion, but maybe out of practice. I’ve spent a lot of time with people who use tenderness, compassion, empathy, and feelings like them as currency—as a means of getting what they want, as opposed to giving someone else what they need. I have always been disappointed by this and thought myself above it, but when my teacher called me tender I realized that I’d internalized it. I’d cataloged myself as one of those people.
But I’m not one of those people. I am someone who really, deep down in my guts and organs, believes there is no such thing as too much tenderness. I believe in tenderness as a currency if currency is a thing that is given away freely and extravagantly with no expectation of return on investment.
The point is that tenderness is not transactional, because none of the best things are. If anyone makes you feel like it is, run away from them. It’s tenderness for tenderness’s sake, for no other reason than the belief in being tender. We’re not talking about love here—because love is one of those words that means so many things that it has come to mean nothing—we’re talking about gentle observation and acknowledgment of one another as tender creatures in need of care.
I hope my friend who is sometimes hard on herself and her hips hears this and understands. I hope she knows I see her and that she makes me feel seen, and that is enough. It’s everything, actually.
And I hope she treats herself with tenderness.
My motto used to be too much is not enough and now it is enough is enough. Tenderness or empathy is a skill that has to be practiced imperfectly and frequently