I’ve been obsessed with this passage from Leslie Jamison for the better part of a decade:
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
I first wrestled with that opening sentence in 2014, when I was applying to graduate programs in public health, midwifery, and medicine, and trying to articulate — in essay after essay — why I wanted to do the work I wanted to do. I came back to it again when I was asked to deliver to the graduation speech for my MPH program in 2017. I have returned to it so many times since that when I flip through Jamison’s book, the pages fall open to this passage.
It is one of the ideas that has most shaped how I think about relational skill. Care is not a temperament, not innate or a default or a given.
It is a practice. It is, when it comes down to it, a choice.
I think about this a lot when it comes to conflict.
A client once told me that she thinks some people are just born with the capacity to walk toward it — to go where the heat is, to have clarity and groundedness there. I pushed back instinctively. My hottest of hot takes, I told her, is that conflict is something we can all practice if we want to. They call it emotional labor because it is skilled labor, and labor can be learned.
What I didn’t say then is that I know this because I wasn’t born with it either. People often assume I became a conflict facilitator because I’ve always been good at conflict — but I came to this work because I felt like I wasn’t good enough at it yet.
I came to it because I saw conflicts end in devastating, debilitating, even life-threatening ways.
I knew even then — this could all have been so different.
I shared all of this, more or less, with my friend Kate Henry when she interviewed me recently for her podcast Honing In. It is one of the interviews I am most proud of — one of the few times I have told the full story of how I got here, why I do what I do, and what it means to me to do it well. Kate is a brilliant interviewer and she asked the right questions and somehow I told the truth.
This week I have found myself in the throes of an unexpected conflict of my own, and it is taking every single one of the tools in my facilitator’s toolbox to keep me afloat. I am practicing the same skills I offer my clients — discernment, reflection, boundaries, consequence, repair, definition, autonomy, power.
I am reminded again — in the specific, humbling way that only lived experience reminds us — that asking for accountability is an act of love. That conflict, like empathy, is a choice we can make, even when — or perhaps, especially when — it costs us something.
