Empathy Exams

I spent large portions of each day – pointless, fruitless spans of time – imagining how I would feel if my face was paralyzed too. I stole my brother’s trauma and projected it onto myself like a magic-lantern pattern of light. I obsessed, and told myself this obsession was empathy. But it wasn’t, quite. It was more like inpathy. I wasn’t expatriating myself into another life so much as importing its problems into my own.

Instead of identifying with my panic...he was helping me understand that evening this...would be okay. His calmness didn't make me feel abandoned, it made me feel secure. It offered assurance rather than empathy, or maybe assurance was evidence of empathy, insofar as he understood that assurance, not identification, was what I needed most. Empathy is a kind of care but it's not the only kind of care, and it's not always enough. I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.

I needed people – Dave, a doctor, anyone – to deliver my feelings back to me in a form
that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that re-articulates more clearly what it’s shown.

Part of me has always craved a pain so visible – so irrefutable and physically inescapable – that everyone would have to notice. But my sadness about the abortion was never a convulsion. There was never a scene. No frothing at the mouth. I was almost relieved, three days after the procedure, when I started to hurt. It was worst at night, the cramping. But at least I knew what
I felt. I wouldn’t have to figure out how to explain it. Like Stephanie, who didn’t talk about her grief because her seizures were already pronouncing it – slantwise, in a private language, but still – granting it substance and choreography.

la belle indifference, a manner defined as the ‘air of unconcern displayed by some patients
toward their physical symptoms’. It is a common sign of conversion disorder, a front of indifference hiding ‘physical symptoms [that] may relieve anxiety and result in secondary gains in the form of sympathy and attention given by others.’ La belle indifference – outsourcing
emotional content to physical expression – is a way of inviting empathy without asking for it. In this way, encounters with Stephanie present a sort of empathy limit case: the clinician must excavate a sadness that Stephanie can’t fully experience herself.