Neither Vapid Nor Intrusive: Empathy Is A Way of Life

Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a hierarchy of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see….Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays, Graywolf Press, 2014, 5

You can’t get the answers if you don’t ask the questions.

If you assume you know all the answers, then you will never ask the questions.

People, most professionals, don’t like context. Context is huge and messy. Context is uncontrollable. Context is difficult, if not impossible, to treat, and the treatment of context is not cheap. It requires a multidisciplinary effort, a coordinated team.

Empathy is not a tone of voice. 

Empathy is not a mask that can be pulled on and off. Empathy is not a disguise or a prank.

Empathy is neither vapid nor intrusive.

Empathy is a way of life, a way of being.

It is porous like a sieve. 

Your body is full of holes, and instead of covering and patching the holes, you invite others into the wounds, you allow the eddies and the flows that trap and drown other people to stream into you, through you.

In this way, you sense, you feel, you begin to think, indeed, to live, differently. 

Informed by experience. Nourished by dreams. Reflecting someone else’s face but also magnifying your own, when who you are can add clarity to nonsense, can lend order to chaos.

Too many people, too many professionals, in my opinion, have the gravity of tin cans, showing off a shiny exterior or a fancy label when they are in fact lightweights, when a single hole reveals their contents are rancid, good for nothing but stink.

I refuse to shelter behind metal, whether the metal is education, money, rank, or position. 

I am the fruit and the vegetable. I am the meat.

Empathy is more than syrup