EMPATHY IS NOT A WEAPON WIELDED AGAINST YOU: sketches for a treatise on compassion – Faye Valerie

November 23, 2025

to open your wound, to lift the fabric and show the torn flesh: hey! look at what has happened! do you see the blood, too? this act of vulnerability is contorted in the Other’s mind, transmogrified into some sick act of exhibitionism aimed at gouging an awl between the eyes of an unwilling spectator.
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if and when you suffer visible and/or seeping pain, friends become suspicious; lovers become exhausted; family cowers in anxiety. your pain, when shared, has become a public nuisance, something to be rug-brushed, whackamoled, censored. to share pain is interpreted as pointing a spear. you rush, gutshot, gored, and gruesome to the doorstep of a Beloved expecting to be taken in like a wounded bird found by young girls. and yet…
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my mind palace is disgruntled by your pain. hey now! you’re staining the sheets in the room of tranquility. oh brother, come on! i’ve placed mine own Self in thine shoes and what do i have to show for it? my rug is all out of place. i will send no nurse to your aid; do you think you deserve it after you have distressed me so? fend for yourself; i am protecting my peace by letting you fester. the more gangrenous you become, the more i cover my nose and bolt my doors. i refuse the smell of your blood; i refuse the sight of your wound. christ on a cross bleeds in my backyard but i have closed the curtains.
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a dear friend of mine is desperately in unrequited love with a man who once came to visit him in his home country. the Beloved became ill, puking at sacred sites, marking mythic locales with his unsettled lunch. this Beloved, sweating and expectorating all over the place, was a demanding ward to steward. and yet, my dear friend suffered not from the nuisance, but rather from the inability to care for this Beloved as he would’ve liked. my dear friend wanted to hold him, swaddle him, scrunch up a rag to dot and absorb beaded sweat: that he was prevented from doing anything (due to, of course, the unrequited nature of his love) caused him suffering. this suffering was not caused by any malice on the part of the Beloved, nor was it something my dear friend sought to run from. i think my dear friend is of a rare sort, becoming ever more so in our modern world.
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in pain and/or under force, you cease to possess your Self, becoming replaced by visions of a violent tulpa wending its way with needles through the veins of the Other. those who should recognize you as a part of their own Selves, as precious and worthy, see only the hurt which stains like tannin rings. they fear that to welcome and tend to your pain will allow that pain to transfer. the thing is: it just might. but that is only because of compassion.
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you care! otherwise my wails and moans would not mias so pungently to you. it is precisely because you are a compassionate creature that you should be tempted to turn your nose! if only you could bring yourself to come to my aid, you would see: the end of my pain is the end of yours. and i did not come to you with this open sore to offend your sensibilities; i came because i love you. i had only hoped it could be reciprocal.