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Empathy Produced Through the Suffering of Another

Knowing that my father had his own burdens, his own failings, allowed me to continue through what would otherwise have been unbearable…

Perhaps it was something in her voice that day, maybe it was the way everything shone and vibrated with the heat, but for the first time in a long time I lifted my eyes from the still empty basin and looked at her. Her own eyes were filling with water, tears that would never fall but hovered there, only inches from my own.

Suddenly my perception of the world shifted. I wasn’t the only person in the world who suffered…My sense of space and self lengthened and transformed, extended itself out the door and down the corridor, while at the same time staying present with me, with my mother, who, to my profound discovery, was suffering not just because of, but also for, me.

-Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face, pp. 85-86

She had suffered. She had seen others suffer. Yet somehow she still didn’t feel empathy. It took her seeing someone suffer for her before she could feel empathy for others.

Some Forgotten Name

Five percent. I felt obliged to say something, but no one was there, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to say anyway. Placing my hand on my neck, feeling the pulse there, I stood for some minutes on the verge of moving or speaking or sitting or something. Then the impulse passed, and I was on the other side of it, feeling as if I’d forgotten something, some name or object or emotion I’d meant to take note of but had carelessly allowed to slip by.

-Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face, p. 68

Lucy Grealy describes her response to finding out that the survival rate for her form of cancer was only 5%. Who was it she needed to talk to, and what name had she forgotten?

Identity and Meaning

This singularity of meaning – I was my face, I was ugliness- though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it – my face as personal vanishing point.

-Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face, p. 7

Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw (Ewing’s Sarcoma) when she was 9. The book recounts how her face became her identity.

She leaves me wondering what my own source of meaning, and personal vanishing point, is. Her case is perhaps more tragic in a sense that yours or mine. Of course I don’t know your situation. But I can’t help but wonder for us, What is it that we point to as the source of all our problems? What is it that gives us reason to vanish from the world?

Give Credit

If you share the work of others, it’s your duty to make sure that the creators of that work get proper credit. Crediting work in our copy-and-paste age of reblogs and retweets can seem like a futile effort, but it’s worth it, and it’s the right thing to do. You should always share the work of others as if it were your own, treating it with respect and care…

…If you fail to properly attribute work that you share, you not only rob the person who made it, you rob all the people you’ve shared it with. Without attribution, they have no way to dig deeper into the work or find more of it…

Another form of attribution that we often neglect is where we found the work that we’re sharing. It’s always good practice to give a shout-out to the people who’ve helped you stumble onto good work and also leave a bread-crumb trail that people you’re sharing with can follow back to the sources of your inspiration (pp. 84-85).

-Austin Kleon, Show Your Work, pp. 84-85

This picks up on my post from yesterday. By giving attribution for an idea, you are allowing other people to go search out the source. It allows people to search what Kleon calls ‘family trees’ instead of just one person. If I quote somebody, you can search out that person and find out about them; if you like them you can find out who influenced them and keep digging deeper.

Remember that we are not called to spread our own fame and apply that to everything.