The Empathy Exams

“Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring the 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.”

Here, Jamison establishes the working definition of empathy that she will refer to throughout her essay collection to explore connectivity through pain. She highlights some of the more difficult aspects of building empathy, noting that the observer’s concerted humility and engagement are required to build that bond.

“You want humility and presumption and whatever lies between, you want that too. You’re tired of begging for it. You’re tired of grading him on how well he gives it. You want to learn how to stop feeling sorry for yourself. You want to write an essay about the lesson. You throw away the checklist and let him climb into your hospital bed. You let him part the heart wires. You sleep. He sleeps. You wake, pulse feeling for another pulse, and there he is again.”

Jamison’s use of the second person point of view invites the reader to explore her emotions with her in this moment of vulnerability. She and the reader attempt to navigate the complexities of letting go of expectations and feeling emotions as they exist and not as they are anticipated to be. When the “checklist” is discarded, there is renewed closeness and healing, making an argument that pre-defined expectations were a barrier all along.

“But up close, they reveal all kinds of scars and bumps and scabs. They are covered in records—fossils or ruins—of the open, oozing things that once were.”

Here, Jamison develops a metaphor that equates past trauma to fossils and ruins. This creates the sense that there is something to be discovered or understood by examining them, enhancing that which makes Morgellons so confusing to many of its sufferers. Their bodies carry a history of trauma that, currently, cannot fully be comprehended.

“This resonance is part of what compels me about Morgellons—it offers a shape for what I’ve often felt, a container or christening for a certain species of unease. Dis-ease. Though I also feel how every attempt to metaphorize the illness is also an act of violence—an argument against the bodily reality its patients insist upon.”

At the beginning of this quote, Jamison compares the Morgellons disease to a sense of unquiet felt in her own body, highlighting her own ability to feel compassion for the patients as a result. However, by the end of the quote, she notes that this is the antithesis of what the patients desire, for in their minds this reduces their experiences.

“It was almost a relief to finally see it, bobbing out of my ankle like a tiny white snorkel. I finally knew it was true. It’s Othello’s Desdemona Problem: fearing the worst is worse than knowing the worst.” 

Jamison, in an effort to make a connection to Morgellons patients, remembers the time she found a botfly larva in her ankle after a trip to Bolivia. She alludes to the Shakespeare play Othello, in which the titular character believes his wife is having an affair. In both instances, the fear of the unknown or uncertainty outweighs the displeasure of knowing the reality.

“I didn’t believe there were parasites laying thousands of eggs under his skin, but I did believe he hurt like there were. Which was typical. I was typical. In writing this essay, how am I doing something he wouldn’t recognize as betrayal? I want to say I heard you. I want to say I pass no verdicts. But I can’t say those things to him. So instead I say this: I think he can heal. I hope he does.”

Jamison describes one of the more difficult aspects of compassion and empathy: when there is a disagreement between perceived facts and perceived experience. She is unable to believe those living with Morgellons disease as fully as she wants to, but she understands they are in pain. In this acknowledgement, she wants them to experience healing with the knowledge that the thing causing their pain, in her eyes, is nonexistent.

“Speaking is easier when the worst has been pushed out of earshot—past the point of being taunted, by delusions of safety, into some vengeful return.”

Although Jamison is talking about the physical move from Tijuana to Mexicali, her words also apply to trauma and violence on a broader scale. Trauma, pain, and fear are all more accessible for discussion once the worst of them have passed.

“The figures are simply toys, emptied of context and significance.”

Jamison reflects on statistics that hang at the border between the United States and Mexico, highlighting drugs seized and crossings prevented. Because they have no dates associated with them and no concrete evidence, they have no true meaning. There is nothing to compare them to; thus they become a representation of physical boundaries.

“‘He took your wallet?’ someone asked me. ‘And your camera?’ I nodded. I wanted to say: he took my face.”

Jamison uses hyperbole to note the most traumatic part of her assault. The loss of her wallet and camera do not impact her; it is the broken nose that will forever be altered by a stranger’s actions that haunt her. She is no longer able to look at herself the same way because she has been permanently changed by her experience, and her broken nose stands as a constant reminder of her trauma.

“I looked back at my own life like text.”

Jamison uses simile here to emphasize her struggle to contextualize her assault. In looking at her life “like text,” she is studying it as if it is a written piece of fiction or history, removing herself from the emotions to find some meaning in the violence she experienced at the hands of a stranger.

“These are gifts for the miners but really, of course, they are gifts for the givers: you will give something back, as they say, and this pleases you. You will cover your subterranean tracks.”

Jamison highlights the self-indulgent nature of some versions of giving. The lives of the miners featured in the essay are not significantly changed by gifts of soda and dynamite, but it gives the tourists the impression they have contributed in some way. Jamison implies this is done in an effort to absolve guilt.

“Every week is a relapse, the viewer thrown back into addiction after last week’s vow to stay clean. Epiphany is succeeded by another intoxication. […] Disturbance is promised, recorded, dissolved—then resurrected, so it can be healed again.”

Jamison highlights the cyclical nature of reality television that subsists on the suffering of others for viewership. It allows an abbreviated version of compassion and access to a traumatic life experience without requiring the actual trauma, which allows the process of healing to begin.

“Alfred says more people have died in LA gang conflicts than the Troubles in Ireland. You’d never thought of it like that, which is the point: no one thinks of it like that.”

In this quote, Jamison highlights the importance of context for developing empathy. The tour guide provides a startling piece of information that creates a new perspective, adding a layer of complexity to the systematic oppression taking place in L.A. gang areas. This is meant to surprise the reader into a new level of understanding previously beyond reach.

“It’s not hard to imagine how Laz, reclining on his lawn chair, might consider the course itself his avatar: his race is a competitor strong enough to triumph, even when he can barely stand.”

Jamison constructs a relationship between Laz, former race runner and current supervisor of the Barkley Marathons, and the race itself. In doing so, she continues to build his mythos, aiding in his ongoing legend among the running community. Laz lives vicariously through the racecourse, taking pleasure in constructing something insurmountable.

“If sentimentality is the word people use to insult emotion—in its simplified, degraded, and indulgent forms—then ‘saccharine’ is the word they use to insult sentimentality.”

Jamison creates layers to her argument, defending the visceral experience of emotions. In building this comparison between sentimentality and saccharine, she establishes levels of judgment associated with the use of this language. This is a necessary step to then address the importance of these sensations and dismiss the degradation of critics.

“She was lots of things I’d never be.”

When discussing the late girlfriend of a current lover, Jamison creates a self-fulling prophecy. By comparing herself to a woman she will never know, she states she is incapable of attaining and achieving the same things as that woman. She isolates herself, creating a division between her realness and the ideal of a person held in her lover’s mind.

“We’re disgusted when anything comes too easily. But also greedy.”

In this quote, Jamison addresses the duality of human thought in noting that many people believe there is inherent value in labor, but we also desire ease of access. This reveals the juxtaposing instincts guiding much of the decision-making process.

“At the time of his arraignment, Charlie was engaged. His engagement didn’t survive the trial. He was imprisoned a state away from his teenage sons in North Carolina. He lost his corporate sponsorships. He lost two years of racing. He lost the right of motion. He lost—as he’d tell me later, quite simply—a lot.”

Charlie’s struggles are described following his conviction for mortgage fraud, and Jamison uses the different details of loss to compare everything that Charlie has been denied. This ranges from a lasting relationship to his own ability to move independently of permission. Charlie himself summarizes his losses simply to “a lot,” which is an attempt to minimize the pain of his experience but reveals the extent of his suffering.

“She had forgiven her body so many betrayals, only to watch it taken from her by pieces.”

Jamison references artist Frida Kahlo, who survived a streetcar accident that left her spine permanently injured. Jamison speculates about the artist’s experience, personifying the body as an entity separate from the mind of the artist.

“I loved getting sad about Agee because his sadness wasn’t mine.”

Jamison highlights a powerful component of empathy and compassion in that it provides a surrogate emotional connection beyond oneself. She enjoys feeling Agee’s sadness because she can experience the emotion without it being connected to a personal trauma.

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

Jamison highlights one of the primary difficulties of empathy, which exists when someone has a life experience the viewer cannot relate to. By focusing on a specific, it enables an easier connection to be built between experiencer and viewer.

“But [Echols] refuses the story line loaded with sentiment and tells the one that happened instead.”

Jamison, while recounting parts of the documentary trilogy Paradise Lost, discusses the autobiography written by Damien Echols, one of the young men who was convicted of three horrific murders. Jamison commends Echols for writing the events of his life exactly how they happened, which stands out as unique against a documentary that has been created with the intention of creating sentimentality.

“My pain had flown beyond the confines of its bone shop. Now it had a summer home in the Pacific.”

This quote alludes to the poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” by William Butler Yeats, in which the poet struggles with his own creative process and notes that to produce work of quality once again he must return to the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” Jamison leans on this description to discuss an essay she wrote that stemmed from a place of heartbreak. When that piece ultimately gets published and draws attention from readers across the world, she is comforted by the fact that her pain is no longer hers alone and can be shared with people.