The Empathy Exams Read Free Page B

needed his empathy not just to comprehend the emotions I was describing, but to help me discover which emotions were actually there.
    We were under a skylight under a moon. It was February beyond the glass. It was almost Valentine’s Day. I was curled into a cheap futon with crumbs in its creases, a piece of furniture that made me feel like I was still in college. This abortion was something adult. I didn’t feel like an adult inside of it.
    I heard making this up as an accusation that I was inventing emotions I didn’t have, but I think he was suggesting I’d mistranslated emotions that were actually there, had been there for a while—that I was attaching long-standing feelings of need and insecurity to the particular event of this abortion; exaggerating what I felt in order to manipulate him into feeling bad. This accusation hurt not because it was entirely wrong but because it was partially right, and because it was leveled with such coldness. He was speaking something truthful about me in order to defend himself, not to make me feel better.
    But there was truth behind it. He understood my pain as something actual and constructed at once. He got that it was necessarily both—that my feelings were also made of the way I spoke them. When he told me I was making things up, he didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling anything. He meant that feeling something was never simply a state of submission but always, also, a process of construction. I see all this, looking back.
    I also see that he could have been gentler with me. We could have been gentler with each other.
    We went to Planned Parenthood on a freezing morning. We rummaged through a bin of free kids’ books while I waited for my name to get called. Who knows why these books were there? Meant for kids waiting during their mothers’ appointments, maybe. But it felt like perversity that Friday morning, during the weekly time slot for abortions. We found a book called Alexander , about a boy who confesses all his misdeeds to his father by blaming them on an imaginary red-and-green striped horse. Alexander was a pretty bad horse today. Whatever we can’t hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it. The book belonged to a guy named Michael from Branford. I wondered why Michael had come to Planned Parenthood, and why he’d left that book behind.
    There are things I’d like to tell the version of myself who sat in the Planned Parenthood counseling room. I would tell her she is going through something large and she shouldn’t be afraid to confess its size, shouldn’t be afraid she’s “making too big a deal of it.” She shouldn’t be afraid of not feeling enough because the feelings will keep coming—different ones—for years. I would tell her that commonality doesn’t inoculate against hurt. The fact of all those women in the waiting room, doing the same thing I was doing, didn’t make it any easier.
    I would tell myself: maybe your prior surgeries don’t matter here, but maybe they do. Your broken jaw and your broken nose don’t have anything to do with your pregnancy except they were both times you got broken into. Getting each one fixed meant getting broken into again. Getting your heart fixed will be another burglary, nothing taken except everything that gets burned away. Maybe every time you get into a paper gown you summon the ghosts of all the other times you got into a paper gown; maybe every time you slip down into that anesthetized dark it’s the same dark you slipped into before. Maybe it’s been waiting for you the whole time.
    STEPHANIE PHILLIPS
    Psychiatry
    SP Training Materials (Cont.)
    OPENING LINE: “I’m having these seizures and no one knows why.”
    PHYSICAL PRESENTATION AND TONE: You are wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, preferably stained or rumpled. You aren’t someone who puts much effort into your personal appearance. At some point during the encounter, you might mention that you don’t bother dressing nicely anymore because you rarely