The Empathy Exams

by Leslie Jamison

Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. 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 horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see:

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query:

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.

I wanted him to hurt whenever I hurt, to feel as much as I felt. But it’s exhausting to keep tabs on how much someone is feeling for you. It can make you forget that they feel too.

Dave doesn’t believe in feeling bad just because someone else does. This isn’t his notion of support. He believes in listening, and asking questions, and steering clear of assumptions. He thinks imagining someone else’s pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it. He believes in humility. He believes in staying strong enough to stick around.

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse.

I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.

It’s Othello’s Desdemona Problem: fearing the worst is worse than knowing the worst. So you eventually start wanting the worst possible thing to happen—finding your wife in bed with another man, or watching the worm finally come into the light. Until the worst happens, it always might happen. When it actually does happen? Now, at least, you know.

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,” Susan Sontag writes, “in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Most people live in the former until they are forced to take up residence in the latter.

It’s an essay about what kinds of reality are considered prerequisites for compassion. It’s about this strange sympathetic limbo: Is it wrong to call it empathy when you trust the fact of suffering, but not the source? How do I inhabit someone’s pain without inhabiting their particular understanding of that pain?

When does empathy actually reinforce the pain it wants to console? Does giving people a space to talk about their disease—probe it, gaze at it, share it—help them move through it, or simply deepen its hold?

when I think of encuentro I hear the word for “story” (cuento) coaxed from the word for “encounter” (encontrar)—

The hotels advertise rates for four hours instead of one. I don’t know what this means, but it seems to mark an important difference in civic culture.

I didn’t exactly leave home for Nicaragua. I’d been leaving home for years. Nicaragua was just the farthest I’d gone.

I made sangria with local fruits and wrote notes from the Internet café that said: I made sangria with local fruits!

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

Maybe moral outrage is just the culmination of an insoluble lingering. So prepare yourself to live in it for a while. Hydrate for the ride. The great shame of your privilege is a hot blush the whole time. The truth of this place is infinite and irreducible, and self-reflexive anguish might feel like the only thing you can offer in return. It might be hard to hear anything above the clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyway.

Empathy is easier when it comes to concrete particulars. I can’t imagine being in prison, but I can imagine choosing a snack.