Welcome to the Conversation: part 2

In which we discuss pity, compassion, and sadness blankets.

Part 1 eased you in gently, discussing alienation and misdiagnosed qualities of life, with a twist of dark Seinfeld humor. If that felt uncomfortable or hard to relate to, don’t worry, because I think everyone will relate to today’s topic. I hope it’s meaningful personally while it enlightens disability experience. 

A widespread response to encountering disability is pity. Pity extends beyond disability, of course. We’ve all been the pitier and the pitied; we’ve all witnessed pity given and received. You know the feeling. Knit brows, frown lines, tongue cluck, aww, heavy heart.  

It’s a natural response to sad and sorry things. I want you to consider alongside it a similar but different concept you also know: compassion. Take a second and feel the difference, if any, between those terms in your head, heart, and hands. What are they like?

Indulge me in an etymology. Compassion comes from latin terms com, meaning with or together, and pati, meaning to suffer. Specifically, pati implied “that which must be endured,” which I love. So we might describe compassion as bearing together with someone that which must be endured.

This differs from pity. Certainly the term pity may have similar origins or overlapping uses; apparently in the 1300s it meant something like the disposition to mercy, to which none of us would object. I think its use and meaning has evolved. It can’t be separated from the related term, pitiful. You see, pity implies that the pitied is pitiful. Do you see where this is going? 

By the late 1500s, pitiful meant something like “mean, wretched, contemptible, to be pitied for its littleness or meanness.” 

I am not a linguist or etymologist; my understandings are not definitive. But let me put the way I hear and experience pity and compassion in simple terms. 

In order to have compassion for someone, to sit under their blanket of sadness with them, you have to know what makes them sad. But you don’t need much for pity—just a gut reaction. 

There’s a reason we use the phrase “object of pity.” Pity objectifies. For this reason, few of us wish to be pitied. I think we understand this intuitively, though the understanding flies away when we occupy the position to give pity rather than receive it. When it isn’t us, we think pity is a nice emotion, a prosocial emotion. When it is us, we’d rather hide or get angry. A philosopher from Bates college explains (emphasis mine):

This may be because the object of pity is seen to be lower than the pitier; the one pitied is often the object of condescension, or even perhaps contempt, regarded as having less dignity. The pitied may themselves even feel undignified…Feeling pity involves acknowledging the terrible circumstances of the other in the recognition of the diminished status that results from being in these circumstances: “Poor you,” says the pitier. “You are rendered a diminished version of yourself, at least for now.” Pity may also include an assessment of the response of the pitied to these bad circumstances: the pitier may see the pitied as responding in a way that is undignified.

I suggest that pity does not require participation or solidarity. The pitier maintains a level of separation, perhaps even a sense of superiority. In its underbelly, pity can make me feel good about myself because I feel bad for someone in a bad situation, which is nice of me to feel, so I feel like a nice person, and I also feel better about my life because I am not in that bad situation.

This sort of feeling prompted disability activist Stella Young to coin the now famous phrase “inspiration porn”, and if you haven’t watched her TED talk, you should do that now. It’s foundational Disability Education.

Let’s tie this more closely to disability experience. What has happened when someone feels pity for me is they have imagined what they think my life is like (I am “rendered a diminished version” of myself) and decided it is Not Good, so they feel bad for me. This sounds like a form of empathy, except that they empathize with an imagined character of me with imagined pains and problems, instead of empathizing with the real pains and problems the real me has. 

This returns to the point I made in part 1: that nondisabled people assume disabled lives are worse than disabled people experience our lives to be. Being disabled may be hard, but not how most assume. Empathizing with me means knowing the real me and my real pain and carrying that with me, or in other words: compassion. 

I have so many pity stories. Strangers have prayed for my healing in random public places. Old folks have tilted their heads, frowned, and asked, “how are you holding up?” completely out of the blue. (“I have a lot of problems, Carol, but what are we talking about?”) I’ve been informed that I am the hero of multiple acquaintances. 

“But wait,” one might say. “Isn’t it nice to be someone’s hero?” Perhaps, if you do something heroic. I wouldn’t know. “Wait. How is this relevant to pity?” It’s relevant because the implication of finding someone heroic for doing normal things is you assume their life is so disastrous, it must be heroic to rise from bed and show up to normal life. 

Now personally, I do believe rising from bed can be heroic. But not because being disabled haunts me like a spector. Existing as a human can do that just fine. (See: On Getting Out of Bed by Alan Noble.)

I have not gotten this directly, but I have seen people remark, “Wow, you’re amazing. I’d kill myself if I were you.”

Dearly beloved, this is not a compliment.

Yet while that has a stronger kick, calling me a hero for living my normal life has the same flavor. If ever I do something great, be my guest. Otherwise, it’s patronizing at best.

Fortunately, I also have compassion stories. They have a shape; it’s really simple. Someone sees me and relates to me as a person, then meets me in a specific need or feeling I really have. 

I think of the friend who surprised me by tearing up as I described an upcoming medical encounter. It counted as compassion because she was one of the first people who ever made me feel safe enough to open up to her, and she listened well enough to hear my real pain and frustration and know it shouldn’t have to be that way.

I think of one of my current pastors, who had only known me for a few months, but sought out building accessibility information for an event we attended and brought it to me before I ever asked for it or realized I would need it. 

I think of my in-laws, who have so readily taken up the practice of integrating me into family trips, occasions, and hang outs, planning for us, not planning around me. The longer I am a part of us, the less I worry, because I am not left alone considering my real needs. 

Compassion need not be perfect. It can make mistakes and have questions. But these offer a litmus test, for me: can I relax with someone? Will I be the only one in the room aware of my needs, making sure I can move in the world? Will I feel belittled or embarrassed by it? If not, I’m with compassionate people. 

“Empathy”, Varsam Kurnia

Ultimately, none of us need someone to feel sorry for us. We need someone to help us bear up under the weight of the world, and to do it because they feel the weight, too. 

Humans all live unique lives of the same kind: as limited, flawed people in an ominous world. Pity borrows the comfort of control, or pretending only some of us are in that predicament. It separates the self from suffering, as if it’s other or distant—possibly avoidable, probably minimizable, likely, at least a little, the pitiful person’s fault.

But the fact is that the hurt in your reach is your calling; the hurt in my reach is mine. If we’re near enough for pity, we’re near enough to dignify the pitied and choose solidarity instead. Pity alienates; compassion draws near and identifies. This does not mean we expect strangers to carry our burdens, but we do expect fellow humans to behold our shared humanity. 

You see, the children who stare and wonder don’t irk me. They’re learning and making space for what it means to be human. But their grown ups, the ones who make sad faces or move hurriedly past and shush the children, they have formed an idea of humanity and decided disability is some unmentionable part of it, or not a part at all. 

Pity abdicates a good calling to be our brother’s keeper. On the contrary, compassion proclaims that all darknesses, yours and mine, are both crushing and temporary. You and I have exactly the same hope, and we both just sit under our sadness blankets, trying to lay hold of it.