True Empathy via Winesburg, Ohio

We have (and this is likely a tragedy) bodily limitations to our experiential input, i.e., I'll never truly feel the emotional travails and/or ecstasy of anyone other than myself. For me, reading is the closest possible thing to achieving this aforementioned (as of right now) impossibility. If we could step inside a stranger's head for a day (or, think: a millipede's, or whale's!) we'd be doing so much better than where we're at as a species. So, when I first started reading on my own, there was a legit, revelatory sensation that other people can hurt in the same, oddly specific way that I do. As I continued to read more in college, I began to transcend, even if temporarily, my own interiority's terrain (mostly made up of neurosis and super-perverted jokes) and gained access to this additional space, one made up of disparate scenarios/sensations outside of myself, and most certainly outside my daily life. What I learned is everyone, for the most part, struggles. Like truly struggles. When navigating the world (usually poorly), because of reading, I remember this. When I feel myself reddening over my roommates' gross-ass proclivities (there are many), or the apathy of mean-faced strangers (there are many), I remember this.

The story that most instilled (and jumpstarted) this sense of (hopefully) true empathy in me is actually a collection of stories: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Though it's not exactly a landmark of LGBQT+ literature, as a tiny, much-bullied, twitchy (I have lots of facial ticks and neurological bummers from said bullying), queer person, I found solidarity with the many, quietly tortured outcasts in this book. Every chapter focuses, with absolute deftness, on the inner dissatisfaction of a different character. And here's the thing, in spite of how unique they all are (in age, disposition, gender, career, etc.), they all f'ing suffer, man. There's Wing Bindlebaum, a schoolteacher whose one source of veritable human connection is through completely innocuous touching (gentle hand to shoulder, or reassuring palm to back), who's wrongly accused of pedophilia (oof!). There's also Alice Hindman, a teenage girl who saves herself for some snot-nosed lump that skips town and leaves her to lie in bed, at night, to stare morosely at her bedroom wall.

In short, Winesburg did it for me. Like no book before it, it allowed me to expand into someone who's a bit more compassionate, while also letting me step outside my own temporal confines, too. (It was published in 1919.) Because that's the thing, it's so granular in its emotional specificity (the way the characters privately ruminate their lost opportunities, their scant-but-still-doable prospects for improved futures) you can't help but seep into the time and place in which it was written.

It's a beautiful book that stretched my brain and kneed me in my little heart.

Anyway, thanks for reading and letting me write this.