Leslie Jamison

A collection of essays explores empathy, using topics ranging from street violence and incarceration to reality television and literary sentimentality to ask questions about people's understanding of and relationships with others.

Essays

The Empathy Exams

It's not enough for someone to have a sympathetic manner or use a caring tone. The students have to say the right words to get credit for compassion. 

This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt: I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and I also wanted it entirely for myself

The author described a pulsing fist of fear and loneliness inside her - a fist she'd carried her whole life, had numbed with drinking and sex - and explained how her pregnancy had replaced this fist with the tiny bud of her fetus, a moving life

I felt the weight of expectation on every moment - the sense that the end of this pregnancy was something I 

 feel sad about, the lurking fear that I never felt sad about what I was supposed to feel sad about, the knowledge that I'd gone through several funerals dry eyed, the hunch that I had a parched interior life activated only by the need for constant affirmation, nothing more.

Which is to say: that kitchen held the ghosts of countless days that felt easier than the one we were living now.

I would tell her that commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

I had an insecurity that didn't know how to express itself; that could attach itself to tears or to their absence. 

. When of course the horse wasn't the problem. Dr. M became a villain because my story didn't have one. It was the kind of pain that comes without a perpetrator.

It offered assurance rather than empathy, or maybe assurance was evidence of empathy, insofar as he understood that assurance, not identification, was what I needed most. 

Empathy is a kind of care but it's not the only kind of care, and it's not always enough. I want to think that's what Dr. G was thinking. I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.

We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. 

I found stray bits of hardened skin and weird threads - from bandages or who-knows-what? - and I read them like tea leaves to discern what made me feel so trapped in my own body. 

The Empathy Exams quotes

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