Leafnfoliage.files.wordpress.com

 Understanding and appreciating other’s pain requires humbleness and imagination. It involves lowering oneself to cross the border to another’s interior world and accepting another to cross that border to one’s feelings. It can be painful, and it can be dangerous, but it can also challenge our ideology and broaden our horizons. As Leslie Jamison wrote: “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. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. [...] The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclination.”This is Jamison’s conclusion in “The Empathy Exams,” her extraordinarily excellent and thought-challenging collection of essays that earned top 11 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2014 after the author’s first novel “The Gin Closet.” The book contains a wide range of topics from journey to perilous territories, men in prison, murder trials, ultramarathon, to abnormal skin conditions. In this series of eleven essays, Jamison explores her and other people’s pain, concentrating on the central question: What does empathy mean, and what is it like in our lives as well as in the lives of those far away from us? Leslie Jamison starts off by writing about her medical acting job, in which she acts as a patient, and medical students are graded on guessing her conditions as well as how empathic they are toward her maladies. Jamison plays several roles, one of which is Stephanie Phillips, whose grief over her brother’s death turns into seizures. If students ask the right questions, they will gradually find out the root is a system of stress and loss that lays in Phillips’ past: a father who died in a grain elevator when she was two, a mother who is on depressant drugs, and two years of physical self-harm. Jamison came to the conclusion that “[empathy] means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response.” By porousness she means patients’ willingness to let a stranger slip inside and uncover their history of pain. The empathy tests then open up Jamison’s personal wound: she experienced abortion and then a heart surgery in short sequence. Jamison has SVT, or supraventricular tachycardia, a condition in which in her heart, “extra electrical node [sends] out extra signals - beat, beat, beat - when it wasn’t supposed to.” The surgery did not manage to solve this problem. Within a few months, Jamison found herself exploring her own emotions and fears. She feared having no emotion and having too much of it, and she craved empathy from other people when she underwent her own problems despite the convolution that “I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and also I wanted it entirely for myself.” Jamison thought of empathy as “a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?”So she did some travelling - her journey of pain and sympathy from other destinations in the world. Jamison stands on the edge between an observer and a sufferer. She dived herself into both extremes regardless of danger to discover the self, painful, guilty, and fearful aspects of empathy. She put herself in the shoes of those with Morgellons, a condition in which patients believe they are infected with fibers, hair, or even larva under their skin. She examined the poverty and violence in Los Angeles as well as the drug fights in Mexico. She traced the murder case of the West Memphis Three and the social issues around it. She recognized the pain of women and defended saccharine. In these trips, Jamison weaved her own personal pain to others. A worm was conceived in her ankle after a trip to Bolivia. She got punched by a stranger in Nicaragua and her nose was broken. In East Memphis, she was strongly emotional toward the three accused boys and unsympathetic toward the ironic reactions of the dead boys’ parents.Throughout the book, Jamison also pondered that “empathy might be, at root, a barter, a bid for others’ affection: I care about your pain is another way to say I care if you like me. We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. The feelings of others matter, they are like matter: they carry weight, exert gravitational pull.” She feared that people would stop loving her if she failed to ‘empathize’ with their feeling and thus, she tends to adopt others’ problems as her own. Jamison even goes further to argue that empathy is a form of self-pity. When she witnessed her brother having Bell’s palsy, half of his face being paralyzed, and his suffering sickness caused by the medicine, she imagined she experienced the same situation. Every morning, she would “[check her] face for a fallen cheek, a drooping eye, a collapsed smile, [she] wasn’t ministering to anyone. [She] wasn’t feeling toward [her] brother so much as [she] was feeling toward a version of [herself] - a self that didn’t exist but theoretically shared his misfortune.” She shared her brother’s pain by imagining she was suffering it herself. In the same way, she was obsessed with the Morgellons condition. Jamison did not judge whether the victims really have fibers or hair under their skin, but rather, she understood their pain. When Jamison won a microscope, she scrutinized her own skin with the fear that she, too, took up Morgellons herself. When she claimed she had a worm in her ankle from Bolivia, and many doctors thought she was crazy, until one actually confirmed she did have one and took it out. “So you eventually start wanting the worst possible thing to happen - finding your wife in bed with another man, or watching the worm finally come into the light. Until the worst happens, it always might happen. When it actually does happen? Now, at least, you know.” Jamison is able to comprehend the victim’s fear of possibility. She is able to comprehend that they are hurt, and that their lives now are attached and obsessed with the weird shape under their skin, like Kendra seeing fibers in a painting, Dawn being afraid of denial and contempt from other people, or Paul retreating to his solitude because “typical” people don’t believe him the way he wants them to. The Empathy Exams is a series of informative, braided essays that introduce the paradox of empathy and its final purpose of lifting our perspective. It not only voices out Jamison’s thoughts, but also challenges and enriches readers’ consideration of empathy. Leslie Jamison, in my opinion, is among the rare writers who can successfully express without lecturing their opinions. She is not an ideal model of morality and she is not trying to be one either. As she admits, she drinks a lot, thinks too much, and has never “been ‘sweetie’ or ‘honey’ to anyone.” However, following her flow of ponder, readers travel to various regions in the world and to diverse layers of pain, fear, empathy, and appreciation. Jamison’s abnormal heart surely has rung an incredible voice. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download