Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays Quotes
No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.
The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.
Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.
I needed people 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.
Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.
Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.
Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.
This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy.
Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.
We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren't entirely aware we had.
Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.
I didn't enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.
It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.
facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.
Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.
Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.
We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.
