Andrea To
Thoughts on Empathy.
When I think about the word “Empathy”, a few things that I could think of are sharing,
understanding, and “ I know exactly how you feel”. The concept of empathy for some people
somehow would be hard to understand or explain because it is abstract. When I was young, I
thought my parents didn’t love me because they were not always at home, probably three
times a week and often left me with my grandma due to the fact that they traveled a lot for
work. But now, of course I know they do love me and realized whenever they were at home
back then, they always spent most of the time with me, just that the inner child inside of me
couldn’t understand that in the past. I call that an example of sympathy. Empathy of course is
unique and different from other emotions, it is more about the connection between us as
human beings rather than individuals. If you are a empathetic person, when you see someone
is crying, maybe you would feel bad or sad for them, when you see someone is happy,
suddenly you will fill your emotions with joy, or even when you see someone is angry, you
should get to know the reason why they are acting that way, then you can understand them
from your point of view. In Chimamanda Adichie’s talk, she never used the word “Empathy”,
but we all know there is a specific relationship about that word and different stories in her
talk. It is all about finding out the knowledge about something, somebody, in both positive
and negative ways, on many aspects and sides, in order to avoid saying something “not quite
nice”. What if Adichie’s roommate would take the time to research about Adichie’s country
and background before meeting her instead of hearing and knowing the common stories all
the time. What if Adichie herself as a kid, would read more that what she usually reads to
find out people like her can be an example in books and literature as well, to embrace her
uniqueness and herself as a human being. The whole concept of empathy can be abstract to
some people, but as a whole, it is about knowledge, sharing, caring and understanding.
More thoughts on Empathy
After watching some few more videos about the ideas of “Empathy”, I came to my own
conclusion that “Empathy” doesn’t have to have its own specific meaning. Not like sympathy
where you just feel pity or sorry for somebody, empathy is being able to feel the emotions
someone else is going through. I have an example about this, for say you h...
