Me, Too!

I feel ya. No, you don’t

People often ask me what super power I would like to have. (Well, it’s happened at least once that I can document. But I feel as if it’s happened far more often and, as we shall see, feeling is all.) I have a ready answer: I want to be Empathy Girl — someone who can, at will, enter someone else’s mind and feel exactly what that person is feeling at that moment. Even a stranger, especially a stranger.

I’m a liar. I don’t want this super power. I already have it.

OK, I lied again. I don’t exactly have it. Right now, well into my sixth decade, what I possess is not a “super” power, more of a perpetually nascent ability to feel what others are feeling under very specific circumstances. The subjects are usually young or old, people who have not learned to guard their feelings, or simply no longer care to. It helps if the air is clear and sharp and cold. No, seriously. The air matters. Under those conditions, I have eased into someone’s skin and understood what they were feeling.

It is seldom pleasant.

A character in a novel or comic, given this ability, would work on it, sharpen it, use it. Like the title character of Stephen King’s Carrie, only with less pig blood and fire. But my power reminds me of the novels of Edward Eager, in which a young person granted this “magic” would follow a particular arc — discovering it, using it, taming it, thwarting it, then losing it. Eager, one of the geniuses of mid-twentieth-century children’s lit, was very firm on this: When we try to bend the rules of magic, we lose it.

So if I don’t push the boundaries of my not-so-super power, nor do I abuse it. I let it happen to me. I walk down the street, gaze out train windows and wait for the moment in which I will feel — feel, not guess, not intuit — what someone else is feeling.

And in this way, it happens. Maybe no more than a half-dozen times in my lifetime, but it happens.

(Chicago, 1980, a public library in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. The boy wore a wool blue cap pulled down to his eyebrows. His nose was running. I was inside his head for at least a full minute. I almost burst into tears from the pain of it.)

I tell you all of this because my first piece for Medium, about the way women in public are treated as public property, unleashed a chorus of “Me, too!” From men. It turns out that I was wrong and men are forever being told by strange women to smile, lose weight, wear different clothing, etc. Yes, men explained to me how this distinctly feminine phenomenon belonged to them as well. Nothing specific to gender here, get over yourself, move along.

Look, anything is possible. I am sure that there are men who have been told by strange women — sorry, but that point might need to be emphasized, that I was writing of encounters with absolute strangers, not co-workers or people you have voluntarily started chatting up in a bar — to smile, lose weight, wear different clothing. Men said it was so, and I took it to heart. My experience is their experience. They know exactly what I’m feeling.

Except they don’t. Because almost no one knows what anyone feels. Even me, and I have a documented mini-power.

Empathy is hard. It might be impossible. Does anyone ever really know what another person feels? One of the delights of being novelist is that I get to say with certainty what my characters feel. However, empathy is not saying, “Hey, me, too!” In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.

(Mount Vernon, outside Washington, D.C., 1964. A woman in a raspberry pink dress with a green collar. The dress has a ladybug pin that is so realistic looking that strangers are tempted to flick it from her collar. She is very worried. She is holding back tears. Her child is missing and she fears the worst, severe injury or death. Her stomach hurts from fear. The woman is my mother and I am alive, sitting in a guard’s command station. For the first time in my life, I know how a story ends before my mother does. I run to her, not only understanding what she is feeling, but giddy because I have the power to release her from it.)

Empathy is not — it’s a shame this needs to be said, yet it does — knowing how you would experience a similar situation. It’s understanding how someone else experiences it. Which may not be how you experience it. So very simple. So very hard. I can say this because for every genuine moment of empathy I’ve known, I have had at least a dozen failures.

(A woman sits in an emergency room where she has been treated for a rapid heartbeat, probably a side effect of her recent radiation treatments for cancer. Her heartbeat has returned to normal and the doctor pronounces her fine, ready to be released. Still, the ER visit was frightening and she is away from her husband and children. She would like her friend to stay the night with her.)

This was my friend. And I said no. I don’t know what I was thinking, much less feeling. Clearly, I wasn’t feeling at all. I let a good friend down and I didn’t know for years, when she finally told me how hurt she was. It bugs me to this day. What good is a demi-power if it doesn’t come through for your loved ones?

The fact is, anyone can know what another person is feeling. It’s really easy. All you have to do is ask. Then listen. And try not to say, “Me, too!”

(A children’s party. A little girl tries to join hands with three older girls who are dancing in a circle. They ignore her, refuse to take her hand, dance away from her. The little girl is resilient and finds a child who will dance with her. The rejection puzzles her, but doesn’t bother her. However, the little girl’s mother wants to pull a Carrie on the three girls who scorned her. I can say that with certainty because I’m the mom. The night was clear, the air crisp. But I couldn’t get into their heads. Maybe I never could.)