It’s not the first time I’ve stopped reading books for the sake of having finished them. Recently I put aside The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea. The writing and reporting were well done. So well done that the casual cruelty by the men in it became unbearable. This is the second book I’ve had to stop reading in my research of immigration issues. The first, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú, wore me down with violent vignettes. The lessons he learned were useful, but I couldn’t finish reading what got him there.

I feel a degree of shame about this. I’ve stopped reading about the murder of children, genocide, cruelty to animals, or gross misogyny. Instead of toughening up with age and experience, I find myself easily bruised, sleepless for nights on end, tossing and turning in a paroxysm of sadness. A single story will haunt me for months. I am, after decades of unraveling defense mechanisms and a gruff shell and layers of ‘busyness”, once again as tender as a green sprout.

If we have despair, it is because we have fed our despair the kind of food it thrives on.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Be Free Where You Are

The shame comes from recognizing that the pain of reading traumatic stories is not the pain of experiencing the trauma itself. I’m reading in the stale aftermath, removed by the privilege of the moment. My psyche should, while cosseted in a comfortable reading chair in a middle class neighborhood where many horrors are imagined, be able to handle the brute force of words. I worry if it’s an issue of respect for the lives that have endured such suffering – so they are not silenced and forgotten.

If we batter ourselves with the horrors of the world, it does not necessarily lead to action. I’ve found that if I take in the steady stream of violence, cruelty, and devastation, I become so overwhelmed that I am paralyzed by depression. Am I learning anything new when I read about the torture of a child by their own parents? Does it look any different than when I read about 6-year-old Elizabeth Steinberg nearly 36 years ago? Do cartel murders truly look any different than genocide by machete or Mỹ Lai or Babi Yar ? Human ability for all manner of cruelty and horror has been established. I know evil exists, sometimes behind the most benign, bland, bureaucratic faces you will ever see.

Awareness is not a virtue in and of itself, not without a moral imperative.

Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons

Every day we read about the banality of institutional evils to the cruel acts by individuals tacitly or explicitly approved by society. We see that monsters live among us. It would be altogether too easy to become cynical, too easy to become hardhearted, to become dismally cruel in our own ways. To be useful in the world, while maintaining tenderness requires its own sort of fortitude.

We start learning hardheartedness when we are young, sometimes by the parental effort to protect us against the inevitable winds that will buffet our lives. Being told one is “too sensitive” or even, unkindly, “a crybaby” posits that toughness is the desired state. We learn to confuse and conflate any sign of tenderness with weakness, an undesirable state of mind and one that should be rejected.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

I am trying to learn to be that more tender self, not just by the lens through which I see the world, but how I react to and treat others who are in this world. It means learning to bypass judgment and to go for curiosity instead. It means knowing I might not be right in my opinions and biting my tongue in order to listen.

It requires self-control to be kind in a world that has equated cruelty to strength and volume to truth. It requires self-knowledge to nurture tenderness towards ourselves so that we can extend it to others. I try and frequently fail to be that better self, but something in me knows that making space and time for vulnerabilities and tenderness might be one of the most important things we can do in this world.