The path to empathy.
“That’s just like you!”
When we were younger, my sisters and I would exclaim this sentence with sheer delight. Every film we watched, book we read and music video we obsessed over, we would insert ourselves right into the story and confirm which character was most like each of us.
I stress, this happened for pretty much every story we loved. The three fairies in Sleeping Beauty, three hyenas in the Lion King, three Sanderson sisters from Hocus Pocus. Which nun from Sister Act channelled our vibe and which Spice Girl was our spirit animal.
It was no question who was who. We didn’t need a Buzzfeed quiz to work it out, we just knew. The leader of the pack, the awkward but lovable middle child, the baby. Even if the story was so far-fetched, even if the character barely resembled us, we’d still look for ourselves and our personality traits in the narrative.
Storytelling has become a bit of a buzzword, so hopefully you won’t switch off now that I’ve used it. A lot of storytelling is about sharing someone else’s story — lifting up someone else’s voice, shouting about someone else’s experience. But I think sometimes we forget that every time we tell someone else’s story, we hold up a mirror to the person that’s listening.
Whether we intend to or not, we ask if they can see themselves in that same story. And even if the mirror is a little cloudy, a little grubby, most people will scrub away until they find something that kind of, sort of, maybe, feels a bit like them.
I don’t just mean looks, either. (If that were true, my sisters and I would have struggled to find anyone beyond Princess Jasmine and Konnie Huq from Blue Peter.)
We also invite the listener to reflect: have you, or has someone you know, been in this situation before? Have you felt this way too? Do you have the same values? That’s why many of the things we consume, like episodes of I May Destroy You or even Eastenders, come with trigger warnings and signpost us to support lines. Stories, characters, plots, twists — they all force us to look inwards, in ways that can sometimes get uncomfortable.
As a writer, I find this ‘mirror’ element of storytelling so fascinating. Maybe it’s narcissistic, to try to see yourself within a story. Maybe it’s because, like I said, there just weren’t characters that looked like us, so we had to do some extra scrubbing to find common ground (even between us and a pack of hyenas in a Disney film). It could be a need to be validated, flaws and all — that person’s like me, she even makes the same mistakes I do, so I’m not alone.
Or maybe it’s the rumblings of empathy.
Because we’re all human beings with feelings. If the answer to ‘have you been in this situation before?’ is no, often we switch the question without even realising: can you imagine what it might be like for someone in that situation? And in finding that answer, through that moment of soul-searching, we learn from someone’s story.
My theory is that people who love to absorb stories are empaths. From novels to films, Netflix series to podcasts, song lyrics to adverts, I think we search for ways to understand ourselves and each other.
That’s why I think it’s crucial to tell all stories. Because someone, somewhere, deserves to feel that connection, without having to scrub the mirror so hard. And someone else, somewhere else, needs to have their mind widened, not narrowed.
And if family man Geoff from down the road, who loves his Sunday roast, can’t relate to a Christmas ad showing a loving dad who’s embarrassingly proud of his gravy (in true dad style), Geoff probably needs to work on his empathy.
