Leslie Jamison

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

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.

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.

Empathy is a kind of care but it__ not the only kind of care, and it__ not always enough.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn't call. But I don't believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes.

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. 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.

Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.

It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

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.

We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.

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.