No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main. […]
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
When I was in second grade, my teacher sent a note home describing how I had shared part of my snack that day with a classmate who couldn’t afford one. In those days, “TGIF” referred not only to ABC’s stellar lineup of shows but also that at school, instead of just milk, kids could purchase juice and/or a food item to have during the morning break. I still remember tearing off a paper towel from the roll beside the classroom sink, bringing it to my classmate’s desk, and pouring out half my cheese curls.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s the last kind thing I did for awhile.
Over the years, I “grew up,” which meant I internalized the loudest messages in my Deep South environment: messages conveying that this kid must have parents who didn’t work hard enough and whose decisions had led them to a place where they were unable to afford him a snack, and that one day he’d likely make those same bad choices. Bullet points and bootstraps figured heavily into such summations. This kid, his parents, and everyone like him (most of whom happened to have the same skin color) were reduced from people into ideas. Beings with a story into points with a conclusion. Lessons with a moral. Cautionary tales to be avoided.
Now I know what such approaches really avoid: the hard work of deep feeling, of confronting uncomfortable emotions, acknowledging the sadness, fear, loss, and defeat in our own lives that rise to the surface when we recognize them in someone else’s story. This process was traded for one that saw those feelings pushed down and covered with an industrial-grade layer of self-protective anger then painted with a gloss of moral superiority. Which meant that, for the next couple of decades, I was a rule-following, deeply angry person.
It took therapy and confronting the loss of the idea of who I was and what my life would look like for me to climb out of that pit and begin to shed the anger and the mask, exposing the raw skin underneath. Then I had children, and the skin became that much more inflamed.
I believe that only people who have experienced and confronted being foreigners in their own lives can know the compassion of welcoming other kinds of foreigners — of “others.” I left the South at 27 to move to New York, a city that felt like both home and foreign territory at once. Then another displacement occurred when my older son was diagnosed as autistic, and one of the reasons I was in denial for so long was an ugly one: I didn’t want to be that kind of person, the kind who was different because of their different kid. I didn’t want pity in the form of hug emojis or social media tags or thinly veiled looks of condescension. I didn’t want to be weak.
Jesus had other plans. Jesus showed me weak, and then pointed out that I actually resided a few sub-levels below that, then turned and looked at me like this was good news. Like a cross and death could somehow be gateways to life.
Contrary to the pithy “God only gives special kids to special people” messages, the gospel message was that I didn’t have what it takes, which was why I needed grace in the first place, and why it would stay, since I would never stop needing it. There is always only one set of footprints in the sand, and they are not mine.
There’s a movement in some circles right now to embrace the idea — another idea — of toxic empathy. The psychology-driven definition of toxic empathy is over-identifying with others’ emotions. But this new, popularized version defines it as an exploitation of Christian compassion to serve political ends. The pedant in me wants to point out that empathy and compassion are not the same thing. Compassion can be performative — in fact, I now know that giving the snack to my classmate had its roots, if not entirely then at least partly, in the awareness that my teacher would see this act of altruism and reward me for it. This redefined version of empathy reminds me of when I was talking about empathy to my son’s class and asked the kids if they knew what it meant, and one raised their hand: “Acting?”
Empathy, however, can’t be faked. Contrary to what this new definition says, it’s not virtue-signaling. It is identification, which requires not just approach, but staying and knowing. Toxicity leaves the building when we don’t turn away from people, but allow them to be transformed from an idea back into a person.
Before I had an autistic kid, I had an idea of what an autistic person would look like, and I didn’t want that for him. Now I know how paltry my idea was — my idea — because I now know the person. Same goes with anyone else I’ve met. Before having a real relationship, I just knew their difference as an idea. People are so much more than ideas. But it’s so much easier to grapple with and manage ideas than it is to do the same with people. People are complicated, not least because there is no true they — we are all people, and we are all complicated. And we all deserve the right to be, which is to say, the dignity of our own experience. Immersion in the disabled community has brought this home for me repeatedly.
Many of the hot-button issues today are often debates about ideas without any real basis in real life. Politicos call these wedge issues, which strikes me as a bit too on the nose — pure ideas with all the humanity distilled out in order to further divide people from each other. Bring up a wedge issue at a party and the conversation will inevitably turn into mockery. But have them meet a fallible, lovable, actual person and the tone will likely change toward real empathy, and not the toxic kind.
Within the autism community, the double empathy problem recently put forth by Damian Milton has challenged the uninformed notion that autistic people lack empathy, contending instead that they experience and express empathy differently, and because of this difference, a divide exists between neurotypical people and autistic people on the matter. Which is really to say that non-autistic people who say autistics lack empathy are actually demonstrating a lack of empathy themselves, because they haven’t considered that experiences besides their own are valid. Empathy is not a one-way street.
In Intermezzo, Sally Rooney writes:
The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life […]
To be loved, yes, for no reason, with no imaginable reward. Sudden proliferation of grace: It probably just makes everything worse. Which in a way it does, worse, more complicated. Tethering him down into the world, barring the emergency exits. Stay and suffer. I promise. Of course.
Christians who believe in a loving God should know better than to turn away from anyone. We are the not-turned-away-from. The ones who are loved through death throes on a cross. “If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things,” Dostoevsky wrote. We need to grow more comfortable with mystery and love.
May we all be less afraid and more willing to stay and suffer and experience the more of a complicated, empathetic life.
As a therapist, I see the ‘industrial-grade layer of self-protective anger’ a lot and am so happy that therapy allowed you the space to confront that grief. I also love that Andre Garfield video!