#Devilsbait

[wastedwinter]

I want to sit down in front of everyone I've heard—listen to their voices in my tape recorder like a child, like an agnostic, like a pluralist. I want to be the compassionate nurse, not the skeptical doctor. I want the abyss, not the verdict. I want to believe everyone. I want everyone to be right. But compassion isn’t the same thing as belief. This isn’t a lesson I want to learn.

Leslie Jamison, "Devil's Bait" from The Empathy Exams p.55

[wastedwinter]

What did Kendra say? Some of these things I’m trying to get out, it’s like they move away from me. Isn’t that all of us? Sometimes we’re all trying to purge something. And what we’re trying to purge resists our purging. Devil’s bait—this disease offers a constant feeling of being lured, the promise of resolution dangling just out of reach. These demons belong to all of us: an obsession with our boundaries and visible shapes, a fear of invasion or contamination, an understanding of ourselves as perpetually misunderstood.

Leslie Jamison, “Devil’s Bait” from The Empathy Exams p.54

[wastedwinter]

The ending paints resolution over pathos. We read, I’m finally at peace, and imagine another who probably isn't...

Leslie Jamison, "Devil's Bait" from The Empathy Exams p.48

[wastedwinter]

Ironically enough, this insistence upon a unified self seems to testify inadvertently to its inverse, a sense of the self rising up in revolt. The insistence codes as an attempt to dispel a lurking sense of the body's treachery, a sense of sickness as mutiny. The disease must be turned into an other so that it can be properly battled. What does it look like when the self fights itself? When a person is broken into warring factions?

Leslie Jamison, "Devil's Bait" from The Empathy Exams p.42