Tag: stories

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.

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‘I have been loved too well’

On By Melina SpanoudiIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

With my brother

Sitting with my friend across our scratched kitchen table in our Norwich home, we talk about crying when we are alone, for our past and present selves that have been hurt- are hurting. In what seems to me a deeply honest set of joyful tears and painful laughter, the sorrow coated, strange-looking words are dropped on the table: ‘We are healing, Melina!’

Months later I am listening to my favourite podcast, Dear Sugars, and Cheryl Strayed discusses how recovering from the darkest period of her life, she nurtured herself back to health, did not let herself be swallowed by the severe presence of grief. I quite literally stop in my footsteps as I hear the phrase: ‘I have been loved too well’.

She explains that the reason she chose the path that, to her, represented healing, was because she had been loved too well to let herself go. Her mother taught her how to love herself well. I have one of those moments where everything overwhelms everything that sits comfortably posed around it. In one warm Athens evening that welcomes mosquitoes, I am so demandingly reminded of all the times I have cried for myself or thought of myself when I have needed to cry.

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I cry with simple, soft things. I cried as my therapist told me I needed to treat myself kindly. I cried when I thought of how my mother put me to bed with stories. I cried when I heard on YouTube the story she would play on the CD player that was placed on my bedside bookcase in Istanbul. I cry as I construct the personal metaphor of myself being nurtured back to health. I cry as I realise I might be missing something that I will never be able to have- I cry as this realisation hardens into a truth. I cry at the thought that I had to grow up abruptly, at a capricious command. I cry at the thought that I didn’t; that I was taken care of so well in pre and post grief times. I cry so often speaking to my father about building things- over, again. I cry on the bed, and I really wish I could cry in the shower, but I cry. And when I’m done crying, it clicks: I too, was loved so amazingly well; I too, was taught how to sprout back.

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And yet, ‘too well’, taken completely out of context, is weighed with some other meanings. Family members, as it goes, commented on the way my parents raised me. Strangely, they commented that I was given too much love- as if love is stored in mason jars- tightly sealed with a ‘use by’ date on the lid, and nutrient information on the back. What a strange idea- that a child can be loved too much, cared for too well. They told my mother to read me fewer stories at night. They told her that I would grow up to be spoiled.

My mother’s response was to read novels to me. My mother’s response was to walk in the snow to take me to ballet and swimming class- she was on the brink of bursting, her belly swollen with my brother. Her response was to send me books about how babies are made, and a massive, soft teddy bear that I later developed an allergy to, from the hospital ward- she was sick with pneumonia and about to give birth. My mother’s response was to have close relationships with all my teachers- she wanted so much to tap into my thirteen-year-old attitude that spoke so much and revealed so little. My mother’s response was to do all this but also warn me that I must never judge anyone because we are one inch away from becoming the other.

And I was so content, and sometimes so desolate; I felt it all so acutely. I knew that her response was to grieve for me more than I was grieving for her.

My father’s response was to hold our fifteen and nine-year-old hands that in a day were covered with wrinkles of a special kind. My father’s response was to give us significant promises for a future that we thought to have seen buried with our own four eyes. My father’s response was to listen to me endlessly as I sat on the edge of his bed and felt so much, all at once. My father’s response was to take me to all the doctors you can think of; any professional that could help- it was so difficult to help, even harder to be professional. My father’s response was to say all the words that were needed, to give all the hugs that, if missed, would have left the gaping, grieving wound developmentally exposed and emotionally infected. My father’s response was to fly to Thessaloniki during a competition. My father’s response was to give every last second of the short hour to patching me back into a functioning quilt. And, now, I still feel it all so deeply; and when I don’t, I know what it means to be able to.

And what were they responding to, my parents? At its core, to the way I needed to be loved; softly, like a patchwork quilt, like ballet lessons in the winter or giant, dust collecting teddy-bears, and novels read out-loud.

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A lot of my writing reads like a tribute to my parents. This entire post feels like I am trying to fit the history of my person in a sentence- a ridiculously absurd, non-existent- possibility? I feel the closest to that that I have ever been tonight. I feel that the closest I will ever get to that one sentence is to say, ‘I have been loved too well.’ That is, so well. I have been loved so magnificently, so I allow myself to be all at once the person who acknowledges the double reality of what it means to cry for themselves.

It is not self-pity; it is self-love to be, quite frankly, painfully honest with yourself. And, in this way, I am rather suddenly reminded of the humanity I am learning by loving myself to health.