Hello all, here is my response to the 2nd prompt.

“Can you truly understand someone whose suffering you’ve never experienced, or is empathy always a kind of fiction?”

I don’t know if there is a definite link between the experiences you have and how much empathy you feel for others. I know that for me, as time has passed my level of empathy has grown a great deal. Where this comes from I am not sure, although it’s difficult to see it coming from anything other than the total of my experiences and the way I have processed them, and so on. I used to be quite an asshole, which is a nice way of saying that I could be quite cruel towards others. Prison didn’t cure me of that. This place has a powerful pull on the worst natures of all of those who become invested in it. If you have a dark side, this place will feed it. If you have a light, it will do everything it can to put it out.

But that is another discussion. After thinking about it I would say that the level of empathy I have now is directly in proportion to how much I have suffered. And I have. A fucking bunch, as a matter of fact. I say this ONLY as a fact. Only because it’s important to this prompt. I don’t believe that suffering is a quantifiable thing, like car accidents or the number of breakups you have had. One thing I have learned (and perhaps this also relates to empathy) is that the experience of pain is highly subjective. I meet people who hesitate to talk about some pain they are dealing with because they think it’s small compared to being in prison. That’s not how pain works, I tell them. There are people who believe that it is. They belittle the suffering of others because they see it as insignificant in relation to what they have experienced or, more nefariously, in relation to the pain of others. I’ve been “comforted” by others with words to this effect (and I think this may sound familiar): “There are people who are in North Korean prison camps that are being worked to death. You should feel lucky!” Despite being an odd way to cheer someone up, getting them to think about people in another country being worked to death, this dismissal of the pain of another is a good indicator of an emotionally immature person. Or even malformed. Emotionally myopic. When it comes to selfishness nothing makes a person more incapable of love than their inability to truly understand the pain or love of another. If you cannot SEE someone, how can you honestly and completely love them?

Can you ever really feel what someone else is going through then, is the question. Some things, I believe, much better than others. If someone close to a person you know dies, and if you have never felt that loss yourself, then the gap between how they feel and a true understanding of it by you can be quite wide. And no matter how much suffering you experience, I believe that true empathy, true vision, this sometimes comes down to a choice you have to make. Especially in here. For me it was a decision concerning the very nature of who I was. I began with the fact that I had a great deal of goodness in me. I knew this because when I chose to think about the fate of others, really THINK about what they were going through, I felt an almost overwhelming wave of sadness. This was true for me for as far back as I can remember. This wasn’t a pleasant feeling. And there is an easy solution to this unsettling feeling. To not give a fuck what other people feel. Even worse, to cause pain. For me, for so long, it felt GOOD to hurt other people. To be a bully. To mock others. To humiliate them. Treat them as I had been treated. It was easy. I was smarter than almost everyone I knew. And when I had the opportunity to ad hoc a reason onto it, it felt eerily similar to doing the right thing. In prison it became even easier. THAT person has a certain kind of cruelty. THAT person preys on people. THAT person is disrespectful. He doesn’t pay his debts. They deserve it. And so on.

The difference between this and just not giving a fuck about what other people are going through is very small. One leads inexorably towards the other. For years I did nothing with the gift my suffering had given me except try to spread it around. Then came a moment when I had truly, without question, fallen to pieces. I won’t go into this either, but for years afterwards, little by little, I began to open that door to the suffering in others. The one I had left closed for so long. It wasn’t easy at first. As I said before, for some reason this practice brought on extremely intense feelings of sadness. And as time went on this concentration on how others were feeling became easier and the impulse to be a shithead began to fade. There came a point where I could take my hands off of the wheel and, all of a sudden I began to see the people around me not as objects to bolster my own massive insecurities, but as stories just as important as my own. Each person was a bundle of energy (literally and metaphorically!) and as such held immense importance in the interconnected lattice of hopes and dreams and joy and madness and love and despair that made up each experience, all experiences, all people. All fascinating in their own right. And without question their pain was my pain and in this we were never so close together as we were in the times we believed ourselves lost and alone.

I’m not perfect. I still struggle not to say that one (admittedly brilliant) quip that makes the person I’m talking to or who’s showing off in front of me feel like week old garbage. But it’s easier. And having experienced so much sorrow does make it easier to see it in others. There is a courage, a strength, a clarity, a deep virtue in rejecting nihilism, cruelty, selfishness, and all the rest. There exists a toxic masculine mockery of kindness, empathy, compassion. Love. This ethos is everywhere. Don’t believe it. It is a position from fear. No, that’s not accurate. We are all afraid. It is the position of the coward.

“Love makes us strong.” Some say that’s a cliche. I say it’s a goddamn battle cry.