The Empathy Exams

by Leslie Jamison

We’re holding the fiction between us like a jump rope.

Wrestling me into eye contact is the way they maintain power—forcing me to acknowledge their requisite display of care.

Other students seem to understand that empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion.

Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.

how it shamed and thrilled her.

we once talked about seeing two crippled bunnies trying to mate on a patchy lawn—how sad it was, and moving.

Guessing your feelings is like charming a cobra with a stethoscope,

Memory fumbles.

I needed his empathy not just to comprehend the emotions I was describing, but to help me discover which emotions were actually there.

He was speaking something truthful about me in order to defend himself, not to make me feel better. But there was truth behind it. He understood my pain as something actual and constructed at once. He got that it was necessarily both—that my feelings were also made of the way I spoke them. When he told me I was making things up, he didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling anything. He meant that feeling something was never simply a state of submission but always, also, a process of construction. I see all this, looking back.

slantwise, in a private language,

I imagine you in every possible direction, and then I cover my tracks and imagine you all over again. Sometimes I can’t stand how much of you I don’t know.

I needed people—Dave, a doctor, anyone—to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it’s shown.

It was an apology that had been prompted.

I wanted to deny her the right to feel better because she’d said she was sorry.

It was a strange intimacy, almost embarrassing, to feel the mechanics of her method so palpable between us: engage the patient, record the details, repeat. I was sketched into CliffsNotes. I hated seeing the puppet strings; they felt unseemly—and without kindness in her voice, the mechanics meant nothing. They pretended we knew each other rather than acknowledging that we didn’t. It’s a tension intrinsic to the surgeon-patient relationship: it’s more invasive than anything but not intimate at all.

He thinks imagining someone else’s pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it. He believes in humility.

They’re simply going through the motions. But motions can be more than rote. They don’t just express feeling; they can give birth to it.

I nod. Nodding offers me a saving vagueness—I can agree with the emotion without promising anything else. The nod can hold agnosticism and sympathy at once.

“If this weren’t happening to me,” Kendra continues, “if I was just hearing this from some regular person, I would probably think they were crazy.” Somehow this makes me feel for her as much as anything—that she has the grace to imagine her way into the minds of people who won’t imagine hers. “It’s not just happening to you,” I say finally. She thinks I mean one thing by that word—happening—and I think I mean another: not necessarily fibers under skin but rather some phenomenon of mind or body, maybe both in collusion, expressing god-knows-what into this lonely world.

I catch myself looking at all the artwork here in terms of sociopolitical fractals: How can I see the narco war contained in every illustrated zebra? It’s a strange feeling, watching quirk spew from the jaws of war—like a guttural cry, flayed and searing, this absurd fountain of rainbow blood. I bend everything according to the gravity of conflict.

Essentially, he is making a claim about disruptions. He says everything proceeds from losing our place.

Which is how we keep something trapped in its place: we give it a form.

There was no trickery. Only a man coming at me from behind, turning me around, hitting me hard. No deception. One of the most honest gestures I’d ever seen.

It was a kind of nakedness, a feeling of nerve endings in the wind.

you did, of course, always greedy for other people’s lives, but first you must listen to the rest because listening is a gift too, or this is what you tell yourself: the tentative idea that this knowing can make a difference.

Your friend the screenwriter arrives bearing a half-drunk chai that disappointed him.

Scholar Graham Huggan defines “exoticism” as an experience that “posits the lure of difference while protecting its practitioners from close involvement.”

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country,” writes Susan Sontag, “is a quintessential modern experience.”

You’ve come to understand gang violence as symptomatic of an abiding civil conflict whose proportions we can only begin to fathom; now you watch church kids fumble their fingers toward Eastside, toward Killaz. Maybe Pastor will change his Facebook profile to a shot of himself and Capricorn gripping palm-to-palm.

Laz strolls over with his glowing cigarette, its gray cap of untapped ash quaking between his thick fingers.

Various tropes of masculinity are at play in Laz’s persona—bad-ass, teenager, father, demon, warden—and this Rubik’s cube of grit and edges seems to be what Barkley’s all about.

I also know he’s promiscuous in this sort of sharing.

He wants to run a hundred miles when no one knows he’s running, so that the desire to impress people, or the shame of quitting, won’t constitute his sources of motivation. Perhaps this kind of thinking is what got him his PhD at the age of twenty-five. It’s hard to say. Barkley doesn’t offer a pure form of this isolated drive, but it comes pretty close: when it’s midnight and it’s raining and you’re on the steepest hill you’ve ever climbed and you’re bleeding from briars and you’re alone and you’ve been alone for hours, it’s only you around to witness yourself quit or continue.

something the flesh can trust while the spirit is being patient.

The hunger for unmitigated and uncomplicated sensation carries on its tongue an unspoken shame.

We dismiss sentimentality in order to construct ourselves as arbiters of artistry and subtlety, so sensitive we don’t need the same crude quantities of feeling—those blunt surfaces, baggy corpses. We will subsist more delicately, we say. We will subsist on less.

The truth is, I resist something in sentimentality too. I’m afraid of its inflated gestures and broken promises. But I’m just as afraid of what happens when we run away from it: jadedness, irony, chill.

the deeply earnest clichés of recovery represented one vector of literary possibility: the recuperated sentimentality of “single-entendre” writing, big crude crayon-drawing feelings that could actually render us porous to one another—clichés that he positioned inside the infinitely complicated landscape of his imagined worlds. He was searching for literature that could make our “heads throb heartlike,” that could hold feeling and its questioning at once. I believe in the possibility of this heartlike throbbing. I believe in the possibility of Christmas risks. I believe in an interrogated sentimentality that doesn’t allow its distortions to be inherited so easily. I want to make a case for the value of that moment when we feel sentimentality punctured—when we feel its flatness revealed, that sense of a vista splitting open or opening out. Something useful happens in that moment of breakage. After the sugar high, always, dwells a sharpened sense of everything not sweet. If the saccharine offers some undiluted spell of feeling—oversimplified and unabashedly fictive—then perhaps its value lies in the process of emerging from its thrall: that sense of unmasking, that sense of guilt. We try to wring tears from the stars but can’t ever quite forget the cracked kettles of our attempts, or the ways our music is always broken. I want us to feel swollen by sentimentality and then hurt by it, betrayed by its flatness, wounded by the hard glass surface of its sky. This is one way to ap...

It’s a dream so obvious I feel betrayed by it. It neither dissolves an extant fear nor illuminates a new one. It simply tells me I’m afraid I’ll say stupid things—as I’m always afraid of saying stupid things—that I will ask questions that are beside the point, that my curiosity will prove little more than useless voyeurism, a girl lifting her sunglasses to peer between the bars, stuttering What’s it like in here? What part hurts the most?

Instead it’s something trickier, less like wish fulfillment and more like making himself vulnerable to circumstance—one of the many subtle liberties this place denies: the freedom to be acted upon by many frames, many scenarios, rather than the single abiding context of incarceration. The principle of inner mobility is double-edged, opportunity and consequence: “I am free to nap when I want, go for a run when I want, fall in love, jump from a building, or eat cake till I puke,” he says. “The most important rule of my inner mobility is that I must follow the trail where it leads and sometimes that is not going to end well.” This articulation of desire fascinated me—to follow the trail wherever, not just someplace good. Incarceration doesn’t simply take away the ability to get what you want, it takes away the freedom to screw up—binge on cake or jump from too high or fuck the wrong folks.

a powerful rhetoric insists we can only be delivered from our old scars by tolerating new ones.

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight. The problem is that sometimes your finger shakes as you gesture, there is no point to point to, and maybe you can’t point anywhere—or at least not at anything visible.

This constant aura of performance is why I think he’d actually make a difficult subject, even if at first glance he looked like a perfect one. It seems like he’s working so hard to pretend he’s something he actually is: a father who’s lost his son. It’s hard to trust any sliver of raw emotion underneath the stilted emotion he performs—the absurdity of his furious indignation, which robs him of precisely the sympathy he thinks it will summon.

This seems like a startling moment of rightness, in a world where everyone seems so absurdly sure of what they have to say to everyone.

“The melancholy creature was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart,” she writes. Sickness was “a becoming frailty … symbolized an appealing vulnerability, a superior sensitivity [and] became more and more the ideal look for women.”

I’ve got this double-edged shame and indignation about my bodily ills and ailments—jaw, punched nose, fast heart, broken foot etc. etc. etc. On the one hand, I’m like, Why does this shit happen to me? And on the other hand, I’m like, Why the fuck am I talking about this so much?

The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic. It’s full of jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick-on-the-heels of anything that might look like self-pity.

Feeling sorry for ourselves has become a secret crime—a kind of shameful masturbation—that would chase away the sympathy of others if we ever let it show.