fiction, empathy, and me
Claim: consuming fictional narratives increases one’s empathy because it trains one to enter another person’s perspective.
Sure, I agree with that. It’s obvious from my own experience.
However, I do have something to add.
I’ve been a bookworm ever since I learned how to read. Most of my earliest memories are of me curled up somewhere, nose in a book. I preferred them to movies and tv, because I liked the exercise in imagination. I liked to be able to think up these spaces, these characters, these worlds all on my own. Sure, seeing things was nice, but creating them myself? There was nothing more entertaining.
You would perhaps suppose then that I was an extremely empathetic child, that I could relate to every single difficulty my friends were facing and keenly understood every interpersonal problem I encountered.
Well, if that was your conclusion, you would be wrong.
I don’t think I actually had any real empathy until I was about 20. A piece of fiction did manage to flip the switch, so I do agree with the original claim, but still, I was 20. I’d had ~15 years of reading under my belt by then.
Now I’ve thought about this and I can see a couple of reasons why this was the case. The first is how I was reading. I think I can say I was a plot driven reader when I was younger, and now I am very much character driven. I wanted to be entertained; I wasn’t looking any deeper. The second is what I was reading. Until I was 20, I had not encountered any characters that I had felt any sort of connection to, any sort of relatability. There was some sense of fascination, but no real lasting connections. And that, I think, was damaging.
I said I did not encounter any characters that I related to, but that was a lie. I did see myself in some minutely, but can you guess what types of character those were?
Villains.
How wonderful is that.
I know why though. Morally, emotionally, behaviorally, villains were messy, and that was more compelling for me to experience than the more guarded goodness of the heroes. I know what’s in my head; I know that I am not instinctively as kind or loving as I show myself to be, so it was cathartic to see the actions of villains.
And yes, that whole circumstance probably did do something to my psyche for a time.
Thankfully, I was eventually able to find ‘good’ characters that were as complicated as I felt, people who were incredibly hurt and who acted like it, who loved deeply but still had interpersonal problems, who struggled with control and loneliness and what matters. And it was through investigating my connections and understanding of them that I became more willing to do so with others.
These pieces of fiction showed me empathy and understanding by casting a character whom I saw myself in as someone ‘good’ instead of ‘evil’ and ‘monstrous.’
I no longer felt like I was put in a box that I couldn’t get out of, so it was easier to remove others from theirs.
~nan
[this is part one of a series of things I wrote about not being like other people, where I've highlighted things that I understand intrinsically differently than the majority]