Tag: Communication

Sizes of empathy

On By Melina SpanoudiIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
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Easter holidays in Greece are the perfect time to write. Unlike the picture above, taken only about a month or so ago in icy Norwich, I can sit in our garden, and stare at an empty word document as long as time permits. My creative process if fuelled by Greek weather and Γεμιστά (Gemista), which, for those of you who don’t know, are stuffed tomatoes and bell peppers that truly make one believe that foodies have it better in life.

Seated in the garden, rested and ready to write, the page remains empty and I pack my laptop up, and head inside. I’ll write later- after a few days, a nap, a long walk in the centre of Athens, a few too many episodes of ‘Easy’ on Netflix, a myriad of internship applications (and a packet of Oreos), under the familiar artificial light that makes me wish I was a morning person. It’s comforting that my laptop is still running on U.K. time…

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I am always trying to wrap my head around what it means to have empathy. I have, on occasion, known empathy to be an awkward experience. As you grow into and out of your loss, times in need of empathy are filled with words that are too heavy in their own hollowness. It feels like trying to handle a stuffed animal that is too bulky, making it difficult to lift and carry around, much more to hand over to someone who needs to be comforted. Here you have these experiences that fill up the room, the whole house, and people cannot find a single thing to say that can help in cleaning up the mess. I’ve come to realise that we demand of people to be empathetic in a certain way that we deeply need. In my experience, the trouble is that often empathy is so much more about the empathizer than about the person on the receiving end. For this reason, as a person who has been (and hopes to always be) in both positions, it is so difficult to navigate the topic of empathy without being critical of myself and of others- which is, paradoxically, the very thing that must be done.

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As a person grieving, I have felt the many textures that are traced through the experience of needing to feel empathy. I have felt that grieving is not a flexible process. I have felt like certain words needed to be stitched through a very specific part of the tear, weaved in with waves of a particular person’s voice. I have felt what it means to expect this precise version of empathy and not receive it. Often, the voice that came was not the right one, the attempt fruitless, at the wrong time, not in the shape that fitted my size of grief. The realization that people do not always carry your shape of empathy is unsettling; to discover that you too are prone to leaving others barefoot in the face of their pain is even more confusing. Grief is unstable as it is destabilising- an evolving experience in which growth and immobility are concurrent processes. In the face of empathy, we are all children outgrowing their old shoes faster than our parents can afford.

I tell my friend that I think of my experience as one that is split down in the middle, at a strange angle. Ironically, my words come out as if I can see a clear before and after. ‘What do you define as post-grief times, then?’, she asks as we are perched up on my couch. I smile because that is a very perceptive question, perhaps unintentionally intimate. It’s one of those questions that catches you in a personal moment where you are carefully balancing your reality between distinctions- then and now, ‘pre and post grief times’. This imagined reality is miles away from the one I have felt. It is my experience that loss lies one moment in feeling your grandmother’s soft hands, and the other in walking past the launderette where someone is washing their clothes with the detergent your mother used at home when you were a child. One day your life is dominated by these moments, and the other, still learning how to move again, ready or not, you must run over to someone who needs you more than you need yourself. The distinction is blurred. Empathy becomes a rope of which you can see both ends, and both are tugged at to stabilise both yourself and the person on the opposite end.

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This past year has seen people I love in loss. Barefoot, I am trying to navigate the game of empathy, and I am full of blisters. I say the wrong things, feel myself questioning when it is right to break the silence, send a message, call, knock on the door. I am an unexpected visitor in someone else’s sadness, and it can be so uncomfortable. What are the right questions? Wasn’t I supposed to know some of this from my extensive experience in the field of grief? And, at the same time, I ask: am I not the person who stresses the individuality of each experience?

In realising the fragility of these situations, I am choosing to ask questions without treading over them with my own assumed knowledge. I promise that I will always take my shoes off in your house if you will let me in.

The language of our memories

On By Melina SpanoudiIn Uncategorized2 Comments
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I write this from what used to be the location of my parent’s bed, now my grandmother’s spare room with the twin beds. She kept the sheets on from the past time I visited, a week ago. I surprised her and she told me ‘I knew you would be here again’, and the undertone was hope.

I get in the all- but-cozy position of remembering all you would on your grandma’s twin beds with the strange covers imitating some really odd, familiar form of modern art. The photo album we flipped through with my cousin last week colours the process; I recognise this without interrupting it. ‘I’m okay with this’, I tell no one.

She comes to me through a conscious process which I will be okay with being intentional. I need this one to be lived. She comes in the sepia films. Little white dresses worn at the age of four, five, six. This time, she reminds me of a parcel of sweets we hand out during baptism ceremonies in Greece. It’s a cultural thing, I think. I don’t know the English word, but it doesn’t matter, I don’t need to know it. Maybe you do, but it will be so empty. We can’t do it like that. It’s called ‘μπομπονιέρα’. That’s ‘mpomponiera’, for you.

This is very vague. I give in to the need for explanation. The words ring in my head in the expected language: English. The intention to express plays out as the inability to do so. The language, the pictures, are all next to my mosquito bitten legs, and they could not be more foreign in their strange, new English shoes. They tread all over the intention, really! Here it is, an experience honest and foreign. These pictures of the pale little girl, plump and rosy, are too sepia, too detached.

This life I needed to see is in film, old as well as aged, and in Greek. I imagine it in the present, as a story, told in my new, brightly coloured English. It could not be farther than the plump mpomponiera. That child in pale stockings did not speak my language. It didn’t think of itself as a story. It is now, but mute; only my voice is heard.

My father’s mother was there when I competed in a school competition for the spoken word. I spoke of the power of stories in a language she did not understand. A mute world apart, her and I looked and recognised each other in every word. But, the experience, loaded with emotion, was indeed mute. I trace the guilt through the memory. I didn’t explain to her. My time, not sacrificed, left me mute. Her time was spent absorbing the story I might tell, about stories.

This barrier is complicated but comical because of that at times. My mother imitated a turkey in a grocery shop. We had recently arrived in Istanbul. She was trying to ask for deli meat. The man knew. He got the message and the meat. She took it. Both were thankful for this encounter, for the communication. No language barrier could render my mother silent when in need of Turkey slices!

Once, sat at a place with zesty lemon cheesecake, in one of the city’s most cosmopolitan shopping malls, the waiter said to her ‘Afiyet Olsun’. She came home and told my dad, ‘Giorgo, I must have looked German to him.’ To my mother, this was German, more foreign even than Turkish. We all laughed about it when we found out it meant ‘Bon Appétit’ in Turkish. I still laugh.

I grew up in a house where I considered as a great personal feat to get my family to speak a broken form of Greeklish. It was, considering the strict rule of ‘Greek only or you’ll forget your mother tongue’ I had to bend in order to achieve this. English became first in a matter of years for me. First choice, first language. Now, I think of how I called my mum ‘μαμά’, ‘mama’, and my thought goes ‘I want to say μαμά again’. In itself, the phrase speaks so honestly of my experience with mixed languages. My memories are tinted with Greek and expressed in English. The filter is the sepia we have on VSCO, the film is from the neighbourhood print shop. Part here, part there. Part Greek, more English, all mine.