Here is Emily’s response to the latest prompt:
“Can you truly understand someone whose suffering you’ve never experienced, or is empathy always a kind of fiction?”
Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” and it’s worth distinguishing this from sympathy, which is simply feeling pity or sorrow for someone else’s misfortune. The key word in empathy is understand: to imagine yourself in someone else’s place, to feel what they feel, to be there with them in that moment.
I have always considered myself an empathetic person. Perhaps this comes from growing up in an atmosphere where reading a room wasn’t optional, where you had to learn quickly how someone else was feeling in order to protect yourself. The subtle shift when a storm is brewing. The change in tone before the shouting starts, before you are belittled or mocked. As a child you absorb these things without being taught them, and they become instinct. Now, I sometimes look for problems where there aren’t any, for example a silence in conversation can feel weighted with threat, however, I am slowly learning that this isn’t always the case, especially in relationships built on trust.
This matters because my empathy didn’t develop as a cognitive skill. It developed as a survival mechanism. That distinction is important.
When I am with someone in pain, I am not observing from a safe distance and trying to imagine what they might be feeling. I am pulled in. My heart races. I hold back tears. I want to tear the world down on their behalf. I am not approximating their experience, I am living it vicariously, which for me doesn’t feel like a lesser version of experience at all.
So when the question asks whether empathy is always a kind of fiction, whether we can ever truly understand suffering we haven’t lived ourselves? I think it assumes a clean boundary between the person experiencing and the person witnessing. For some people, that boundary is more porous than the question allows for. The real question isn’t whether I’ve experienced their suffering. It’s what counts as experiencing something in the first place.
I am there. And in that moment, I am them.
Robert Hiraeth 