9. Compassion over empathy
Start with empathy but stop before you get overwhelmed.
Last week I hosted a screening of Gaza Surf Club. As a surfer I recognized the familiar motions of hitting up your buddies when the waves look good, waxing your board in the parking lot, bracing yourself for the paddle out. I felt the secondhand joy of someone catching a wave – one guy even did a headstand after taking off – that feeling of pure bliss when you’re synchronized with the ocean.
I loved this film because it portrayed Palestinian joy and recently there hasn’t been much of that. No one is voicing support for their Palestinian colleagues in the company chats, and the ones who are speaking out are facing unlawful firings. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be experiencing the devastating loss of life in your motherland, while also having no one validate that what you’re experiencing is very real and very awful.
I realize though, that it’s not my job to try and feel someone else’s pain. It doesn’t help either of us for me to sit and cry with you: now there’s two of us wallowing about something that still isn’t addressed. In these moments I find myself thinking about the Spectrum of Empathy. While it’s educational to ground yourself in the reality of what others are going through, I’m not sure it’s useful to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes when you could be going to get help instead.
Start with empathy and stop when you reach that threshold between being able to take action versus being overwhelmed. It can take a few tries to define that line for yourself; I’ve been doomscrolling a lot, to a point where any intention of action (oh lemme call my senator, sign a petition, support a Palestinian artist) gets steamrolled by a charged emotional state.
When I’m overwhelmed, I am not able to act. And when I am not able to act, I am not able to serve my community around me. I have been horrified at how quickly the Palestinian death toll continues to tick past 20,000 people. Instead of trying to feel their pain though, I have been nudging myself to stay in my action zone and urge you to do the same.
Here is one super simple one click way to reach all your elected officials. Done with that? Here are some other advocacy resources.
Toybox
📺 Gripped by the animation and storyline in Blue Eye Samurai. I was so moved by Youn Yuh-jung’s portrayal of older Sunja in Pachinko.
🎧Enjoyed hearing Steven Yuen share how he arrived at that emotional church singing scene, and how Michael Imperioli approached his White Lotus role with subtlety in the A24 Podcast.
👩🍳Mesmerized by the Hasselback method of cooking butternut squash. And how have I been paying $16 a pop for these easy to dupe Din Tai Fung Green Beans?!
That’s it for this edition, take care until the next.
XOXO JZ
I’m so glad you brought up the spectrum of empathy. I had never heard of it before, but I swear it was the exact conversation I had with my therapist this week, but in different words. We were talking about standing strong in our own emotion and choosing not to take on the emotions of others, but I was confused about how we’re supposed to “attune” to our partners and friends while also standing strong in our own emotion. Apparently they are not mutually exclusive as I thought they were. Apparently having boundaries for our emotions is a skill to be developed. I always considered myself an empath, but now I’m seeing I just have low emotional boundaries. As I dive deeper into acting, however, I am wondering if closing myself off to others’ emotions will make them harder to access when I do want to feel them, which would be upsetting for me. Also, just knowing where that emotional boundary sits for myself is has got me worried I won’t know when I’ve breached my boundary. I tend to swing wide in my emotions. Either I’m completely closed off or sitting in hysteria and grief with others feelings. It’s super hard for me to find the middle ground or to feel like I have control over my feelings.
Polling data suggests that about 75% of Palestinians (in Gaza and the West Bank) support Hamas’s October 7 massacre:
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1731228679382999123
Unfortunately there are innocent victims in every war. Do you also have empathy for the Israelis whose family members were raped, tortured, and/or killed by Palestinian terrorists, the Israelis who are still held hostage in Gaza, and the Jews around the world who feel unsafe because of Muslim terrorists, terrorist sympathizers and their leftist supporters violently protesting in the streets for Jews to be killed?