Mollie O'Leary

I wrote the first draft of “On Empathy” on the day Roe and Casey were overturned. I revised and then submitted the final draft three days later. Usually, my initial drafts don’t succeed in uncovering an essential layer in the poem that later drafts are able to excavate. This poem was different. There was an obvious urgency behind it that made it develop more quickly.

I realize the title “On Empathy” might be polarizing because empathy is a loaded term. It is great in theory but often poorly executed in practice. The idea of being an ‘empath’ is sort of a running joke now because claiming to be an empathetic person has become a way for people to center themselves instead of the experiences of others–which is, of course, empathy’s actual goal.

While writing this poem, I thought of the times I’ve fumbled in expressing empathy and the times I’ve been on the receiving end of this experience. In claiming to know how someone feels when extending empathy, I sometimes run the risk of making the exchange about myself and flattening the complexity of that person’s pain. There is a difference between relating to someone and inadvertently eclipsing their struggle with my own.

This is where the idea of imagination became important for me. When I say, I can imagine your pain, I’m acknowledging that there is a gap between our experiences which I can’t close in order to truly know how you feel, but I am still trying to bridge it in solidarity with you. Taking time to pause and imagine experiences outside of our own is an exercise in empathy.

In this sense, empathy is inextricable from imagination. I want people to not just consider the rhetoric around abortion, but to imagine the embodied experience of it—the reality of forcing someone to be pregnant.

I know this poem alone can’t reverse the decision, but writing it still felt important. It is a record of a moment in history and a refusal to let it go unscrutinized. In Casey, the court ruled that there was a realm of personal liberty which the government could not enter. Today, this is no longer true. This retraction and its consequences, in my mind, betray a fundamental and willful lack of empathy. At its best, I want this poem to point us toward another way of being—a lighter, less burdened way of being.