Leslie Jamison - The Empathy Exams: Essays (2014)

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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.

Leslie Jamison

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn't know if this was empathy or theft.

Leslie Jamison

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.

Leslie Jamison

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

Leslie Jamison

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

Leslie Jamison

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.

Leslie Jamison

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

Leslie Jamison

Empathy isn't just listening, it's 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.

Leslie Jamison