#quoteheartbreak

[wastedwinter]

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

Alain de Botton, Twitter (2014)

[wastedwinter]

Nick Laird, from “Up Late”   (Granta Issue 154)

[wastedwinter]

Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot... It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

—Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

[wastedwinter]

It’s an essay about what kinds of reality are considered prerequisites for compassion. Its 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? That anxiety is embedded in every layer of this essay; even its language every verb choice, every qualifier. […] I wish I could invent a verb tense full of open spaces—a tense that didn’t pretend to understand the precise mechanisms ofwhich it spoke; a tense that could admit its own limits. As it is, I can’t move an inch, finish a sentence, without running into some crisis of imputation or connotation. Every twist of syntax is an assertion of doubt or reality.

Leslie Jamison, “Devil’s Bait” from The Empathy Exams p.40

[wastedwinter]

Whatever we can't hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it.

Leslie Jamison, from “The Empathy Exams” p.11

[wastedwinter]

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.[...] I obsessed, and told myself this obsession was empathy. But it wasn't, quite. It was more like impathy. I wasn’t expatriating myself into another life so much as importing its problems into my own.

Leslie Jamison, from “The Empathy Exams” p.20

[wastedwinter]

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...

Leslie Jamison, from “The Empathy Exams” p.6

[wastedwinter]

The nurse will eventually ask, how do you feel about getting the procedure? Tell her you feel sad but you know it’s the right choice, because this seems like the right thing to say, even though it’s a lie. You feel mainly numb. You feel numb until your legs are in the stirrups. Then you hurt. What ever anesthesia comes through the needle in your arm only sedates you. Days later you feel your body cramping in the night— a deep, hot, twisting pain-and you can only lie still and hope it passes, begging for sleep, drink for sleep, resent Dave for sleeping next to you. You can only watch your body bleed like an inscrutable, stubborn object something harmed and cumbersome and not entirely yours. You leave your body and don’t come back for a month. You come back angry.

Leslie Jamison, from “The Empathy Exams” p.39

[wastedwinter]

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. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say going through the motions— this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.

— Leslie Jamison, from “The Empathy Exams” p.23

[wastedwinter]

Because—what if that particular goldfinch (and it is very particular) had never been captured or born into captivity, displayed in some household where the painter Fabritius was able to see it? It can never have understood why it was forced to live in such misery: bewildered by noise (as I imagine), distressed by smoke, barking dogs, cooking smells, teased by drunkards and children, tethered to fly on the shortest of chains. Yet even a child can see its dignity: thimble of bravery, all fluff and brittle bone. Not timid, not even hopeless, but steady and holding its place. Refusing to pull back from the world.

Donna Tartt, from “The Goldfinch” p.890

[wastedwinter]

A 1983 study titled “The Structure of Empathy” found a correlation between empathy and four major personality clusters: sensitivity, nonconformity, even temperedness, and social self-confidence. I like the word structure. It suggests empathy is an edifice we build like a home or office—with architecture and design, scaffolding and electricity. […]It’s the last cluster, social self-confidence, that I don’t understand as well. I’ve always treasured empathy as the particular privilege of the invisible, the observers who are shy precisely because they sense so much—because it is overwhelming to say even a single word when you’re sensitive to every last flicker of nuance in the room. “The relationship between social self-confidence and empathy is the most difficult to understand,” the study admits. But its explanation makes sense: social confidence is a prerequisite but not a guarantee; it can “give a person the courage to enter the interpersonal world and practice empathetic skills.” We should empathize from courage is the point and it makes me think about how much of my empathy comes from fear. I’m afraid other people’s problems will happen to me, or else I’m afraid other people will stop loving me if I don’t adopt their problems as my own.

Leslie Jamison, from “The Empathy Exams” p.22

[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]

Decety has found that imagining the pain of others activates the same three areas (prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, anterior cingulate) as experiencing pain itself, I feel heartened by that correspondence. But I also wonder what it's good for.

Leslie Jamison, from “The Empathy Exams” p.22

[wastedwinter]

Prayer isn't about likelihood anyway, it's about desire—loving someone enough to get on your knees and ask for her to be saved. When he cried in that chapel, it wasn’t empathy—it was something else. His kneeling wasn’t a way to feel my pain but to request that it end.

Leslie Jamison, from “The Empathy Exams” p.15

[wastedwinter]

Dr. M. became a villain because my story didn't have one. It was the kind of pain that comes without a perpetrator. Everything was happening because of my body or because of a choice I’d made. I needed something from the world I didn’t know how to ask for. I 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.

Leslie Jamison, from “The Empathy Exams” p.15

[wastedwinter]

Being temporary doesn't make something matter any less, because the point isn't for how long, the point is that it happened.

Robyn Schneider, Extraordinary Means