Leslie Jamison

Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods weren__ hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose. It was ostensibly a complaint, but I think he liked his metaphor, and liked that our moments of distance were subtle enough to require this kind of formulation. Meaning that I was a complex creature and so was he; that he became even more complex in his attempt to bridge the gap between our complexities; that he could create a complicated image to house this complex of complications. This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it.

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: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?

It was a look that suggested emotions happening just past your line of sight: a grief so deep you'd never be able to see it, a love so fierce it could swallow itself completely.

Freedom from one man is just another one.

We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn__ wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human___nd isn__ granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?

I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.

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.

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.

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging "Say it new! Say it new!" It's hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

That was a moment where something clarified about shame for me: it__ not just something negative but some kind of arrow, it__ pointing at something, some confusing blend of fear and desire. There was liberation in that, thinking of shame as something to follow, like a path__ather than simply something to be paralyzed by, or try to dissolve, or become second-level meta-shamed by (i.e. __ shouldn__ even be having this feeling of shame_)

It's easier, somehow, if there's a reason for tragedy - lust or jealousy or hatred or revenge. We can find in these explanations an emotional tenor commensurate with the gravity of the act. There's something we recognize as human, a motive toward which we can direct our rage but can also understand, at some primal level, as an extension of ourselves.

Empathy isn__ just listening, it__ 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.

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 means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response. My Stephanie script is twelve pages long. I think mainly about what it doesn't say.

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.