"I spent large portions of each day-pointless, fruitless spans of time- imagining how I would feel if my face was paralyzed too. I stole my brother's trauma and projected it onto myself like a magic-lantern pattern of light. I obsessed, and told myself this obsession was empathy. But it wasn't, quite. It was more like inpathy. I wasn't expatriating myself into another life so much as importing its problems into my own."
I chose this paragraph because I think it really shows how Jamison views empathy- and I think many of us view empathy the same way. I think that if I spend hours imagining what it would be like to be _____, then I can truly understand how that person feels. It almost seems selfish to spend so much time of our perfect lives imagining what a couple hours of life would be like if we were thinking of someone else in a terrible situation. Because after we are done imagining, we go back to our regular lives. If you see someone in a wheelchair, you empathize with them and imagine what it would be like not to walk. Then you keep walking down that street, and forget about the person who was wheeling themselves in the opposite direction. It seems like sometimes empathy replaces pity.
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