A few weeks ago, my good friend Kate shared a really
insightful video on the difference between empathy and sympathy. I’ll link to
it here if you’re interested in watching it. It’s only 3 minutes long and
brings up a lot of good points.
The part of the video that struck me the most was how it
explained that empathy is a choice and a vulnerable one at that. To empathize
with someone requires reaching deep within yourself to find an experience that
knows the negative feeling that person is going through. It came to light for
me a few weeks ago when in the span of 8 days, I was present to 5 different
health-related hazards despite not being directly related to the affected
person; I was either in the vicinity when the hazards occurred or someone I’m
connected to was related to them. After the 5th one, I noticed I was
actively feeling downbeat the rest of the day after hearing the news. I spent a
lot of time thinking about that concept and came to the following conclusion: because
I cared for those who were directly affected by the news, I decided I wanted to
feel their pain. I cared about them enough that their sadness mattered to me,
so I made a conscious decision to feel with them. I wanted to empathize and to
connect with their feelings, so I was intentionally downbeat as a result.
Today I was having, to put it lightly, an emotionally crappy
morning and it wasn’t even work-related. Things were going haywire in my head.
I was freaking out over what turned out to be a whole lot of nothing and there
were other things I couldn’t make sense of that morning. Gratuitously enough,
one of my best friends responded to a funny story I told them and that simple
text helped me start the process of getting out of that emotionally crappy
place. My emotional state started to stabilize from that moment and the rest of
the day I felt I was going to be okay and slowly but surely felt better about
things.
When I was at Santa Clara, it was really obvious to most people when I was
having a bad day. I would be lacking the energy and happy-go-lucky attitude
that people associate with me. People would see that and ask me what’s wrong.
But now that I’m in the workplace where I get a lot of time to myself, none of
my friends are going to see me continually shrugging and displaying drained
body language. I’m starting to realize that if my friends are going to know
that I’m struggling or having a bad day, I’m either going to have to
text/message them indicating just that or have them happen to contact me when I’m
going through that phase. It turns out during that morning, I told only very
few people that I was going emotionally haywire when I was in a place where I
would’ve just wanted many more of them to message me and remind me that they’re
thinking of me.
Reflecting upon that experience, I’m starting to think there’s
a second side to this decision of empathy. I make a decision whether to let
people have a choice on whether they want to empathize with me. Many times, I instinctively
take away the choice from them. For as seemingly adept as I am with reaching
out to people to spend time, it’s ironic that I struggle with reaching out
during times when I absolutely need support or need a friend. I make a lot of excuses
as to why I sometimes don’t want to let anyone into my dark place. These
examples include: “I’m only going to drag down the mood.” “I shouldn’t burden
them.” “They’re having fun. I don’t want to ruin it for them.” If I would
choose to empathize with the people I love and care about in a heartbeat,
shouldn’t I give those same people that care about me the opening to decide
whether they want to empathize with me? Shouldn’t I trust them to actively want
to feel with me when I’m going emotionally haywire and in a dark place? I know
today I had a few friends in mind that I was rather close to telling, “I’m
having a bad day and I wanted to let you know” and then proceeded not to
because I made various excuses not to tell them.
To be honest, these thoughts leave me with more questions
than more clear-cut insights. But if there’s an insight I feel more solid about,
it’s this: empathy is a two-sided decision. One side of the empathy decision is
the choice I make to connect with someone in their emotionally dark place. The
other side of the empathy decision is to decide whether to let others choose
whether to empathize with me or not; to let others know, “I’m struggling and I
need a friend” and to let them make their own decision whether to empathize with
me or not. Through all these questions and unfinished thoughts, I can certainly
say the latter is a huge growing edge for me in terms of empathy.
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