Red Glasses
Or Maybe "I am the Carrie; I Cry for the Trees."
This week, my daughter sent me this SNL skit about women in red glasses.
And I thought, “Uh-oh.”
I do not have little red glasses, but I do have royal blue glasses.
I told her that royal blue glasses didn’t count.
She laughed.
It made me think, though, about how easy it is to pick on people and make generalizations from just one aspect of their personality—or their clothing. The skit is super funny, but it also made me worry about all the red glasses women out there.
Here’s the thing: I worry a lot about people and dogs and trees and how they feel.
“You have a lot of empathy. Maybe too much?” one of my friends said last week. “Did you cry when the town cut the trees down by your house?”
“How did you know?”
“You are the type of person who would cry for trees,” they said. “Too much empathy.”
Sigh.
Last year, I was coaching one of my writers, who is a therapist and she paused in the middle of our discussion of plot structure and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with as much empathy as you.”
For a moment, I wasn’t sure what to say, but I didn’t want to leave her hanging and I blurted out to make up for my pause, “That’s probably a bad thing, isn’t it?”
“It can make it hard to put yourself first,” she said, “but I actually think it’s a very good thing.”
“Nice spin!” I laughed.
She laughed, too. “I mean it.”
Hyper-empathy can also be a symptom of borderline personality, it turns out. She didn’t mention that. People with hyper-empathy have a hard time saying no, are often co-dependent, can have really big reactions when other people are negative, feel people’s pain (or trees) as if it’s their own.
I have no idea if I have that, but maybe?
Anyway, it was a little strange in a good way, but the conversation resonated enough for me to remember it and to play it back this past week as I got called out for being Carrie who cries for the trees.
Also, this week, I learned that empathy, it turns out, can make you more creative, but not the kind of creative that we might expect.
There’s been a study about it..
“Being able to consider another person’s point of view (what researchers call perspective taking or cognitive empathy) leads to more engagement in everyday creativity and creative achievement,” according to the Greater Good’s Jill Suttie’s take on the study. She continued, “He and his colleagues also found that participants good at perspective taking tended to achieve more in the arts, suggesting that this kind of empathy leads to greater accomplishment.
“‘People who identify as more empathic tend to be more creative but also tend to produce,’ says Pelowski. ‘Perhaps, having some of these cognitive empathic abilities gives you the tools to really be a productive creative person.’
I am nothing if not a productive creative person. But is empathy really the key to that? Or just one of the keys?
“Interestingly, greater empathy didn’t affect all achievement in the arts. While it was tied to accomplishment in visual art, creative writing, inventing, scientific discovery, and the culinary arts, it wasn’t tied to achievement in music, theater, film, and dance. Pelowski isn’t sure why that is, but it could be that he and his colleagues just didn’t have enough data to show a relationship or that achievement in these areas requires more time, training, or access to opportunity than other creative endeavors,” Suttie continued.
The relationship is there for cognitive empathy but not emotional empathy, and that is wild to me. Suttie writes that it feels counterintuitive and it does.
“After all,” she writes, “art often stimulates strong emotional reactions in people; so, you might assume successful creatives feel others’ emotions more keenly. Plus, research finds that highly sensitive people tend to be more creative and emotionally empathic, suggesting a potential relationship.”
But that’s not quite what the study found.
I’ve written about empathy a lot on here, about how it helps you write, about how it helps you live, about how it is brave to put yourself in other people’s shoes/position, to admit that you feel.
Very basically: Cognitive empathy is being able to figure out someone else’s perspective, how they feel and think and feel about things. Emotional empathy is when you experience what they are experience, feeling their emotions with them.
But there’s a third kind, too: Compassionate empathy.
“With this kind of empathy, we not only understand a person’s predicament and feel with them but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed,” Daniel Goleman wrote.
There’s a really interesting resource about those kinds of empathy, how to increase it, how to balance them, etc. over here. I’m going to start trying to tweak over to the compassionate empathy a bit more this week. I hope you’ll join me.