HERE’S HOW it starts: My throat is so sore that I can’t speak. I’m in the very back of my Math 10 class, cramming a 19-page reading I have to know in less than an hour. It’s only 9:00 AM, but I’m ready to get to the end of the day—probably award myself with some Flaming Wings for getting myself to school on time.

I am one-fourth through Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams (2014) when I realize it’s a good text. Halfway in, I have to pause. I tell myself that I can’t afford to be emotional as my professor drones on about quartile values, but I can’t bring myself to calm down, either. It’s hard to read an absolute stranger ask the things you’ve always needed to ask yourself. 

I used to never see anything wrong with how I would keep people from seeing me take down my walls. It was far easier for me to desensitize and downplay my traumas than to bring them up with others. I have always thought it was selfless to grin and bear things on my own instead of reaching out. I thought all these little things until that one Purposive Communication reading where Jamison wrote, “This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt. I wanted someone else to feel it with me and also I wanted it entirely for myself.”

To be empathetic is easy, but to demand it of others is not as simple. 

To avoid being disappointed in others, I’ve made the conscious choice of not giving the people around me the chance to empathize with me. I believed that I had set the bar for compassion too high. I was selfish with my pain, carrying the weight of it around without any intentions to share, and yet I had the audacity to be disappointed that nobody was capable of lessening my load. The double blade of hurt. 

While empathy’s German counterpart literally translates to “to feel as one with,” the concern that I’ve only ever allowed myself to accept is the type where people admit that they can’t empathize. “That must be hard”—for every failed test, the occasional broken bone, some relationship that didn’t work out—never really sat quite well with me; it often led to the other person delving into their own experiences, sometimes making me feel as though my grievances were small in comparison.  

“I can’t imagine,” on the other hand, was a pill much easier to swallow. “I can’t imagine,” is simultaneously the farthest and the closest I have let people to my pain. I would grade all the people who loved me in my head, rank them based on how well they reacted to my virtually invisible cries for help. For every self-deprecating joke or angsty poem that nobody saw through, I retreated more into myself. I don’t know why it was so hard for me to just say things—that I wasn’t okay, that I needed a friend—rather than to just downplay things and be upset when no one notices.   

In my own selfish pursuit of proving my capacity for consideration, I’d neglected the people who cared about me. Too often have I dismissed efforts people have made to make me feel better. It was never a case of whether I thought I deserved it; it was just this irrational fear that they wouldn’t live up to my “standards,” and therefore shouldn’t even try. I had forgotten that empathy was more than just emotion; it was choice. It was not assuming how someone felt lest you got it wrong. It was waiting, and asking, and doing more than just listening. It was a plethora of actions, some just less obvious than the other. 

Here’s how it really starts: My throat is still sore. I am at second floor Gonzaga, having lunch with a boy who insists I try not to talk at all; who berates me for getting a sugary mango shake. I have always thought him to be unemotional, but then he sees through my jokes about getting a tonsillectomy. He asks me if I’m okay. A good attempt—no, I think to myself, don’t think of it like that. “I don’t think so,” I admit, my voice cracking on either the lump in my throat or the fear of being seen. 

He doesn’t care. He asks me why, even though I try to take it back He asks me again, and I decide to tell him. I try not to dock points for his body language. I try to give him a chance when he gives me advice. I throw away the ranking system in my head; intentionality was never meant to be the enemy. Who was I to give out merits for empathy when it was always inherent in the people around me, just presented in different forms? 

As I talk to him about my day, he listens. He hears. He lets me let him in.