Empathy as a Call to Action.

When I feel your pain, I want to do something. I want to do something to help, I want to do something to fix.

Social media isn't designed for impact response, all the tools available are sympathetic and hallow.

Sympathy doesn't require real connection. In fact, it keeps you at a distance- a safe distance.

It keeps you safe, it let's you think you're doing something without actually having to do something.

Empathy on the other hand is hard. This means you have to feel something with someone. That means you have to feel sadness and heartache and loss, and disappointment. A sense of failure and loneliness. And that's hard.

It requires a certain honesty you have to have within yourself. That honesty and vulnerability, that's what brings us together, that's important.

If empathy is so hard why can't we just be sympathetic and call it a day?

Connection feeds a meaningful existence. As humans, we need that connection. Loving someone and being loved, caring for someone and being cared for, having someone share your pain and sharing their's. Taking that risk makes us better friends, better parents neighbors, better people.

Social media offers us opportunities to connect in a way that we wouldn't because we never met these people in our lives.

But we also need it on a global scale. Connection is needed for a peaceful society. We live in this world with all kinds of religious, ethnic, social differences and in order to bridge that gap we have to start to feel what it feels like to be somebody else, somebody who's completely different from us.

When we're looking at empathy and sympathy, we have to ask ourselves, is this self-preservation or self protection? And you have to be really honest if you want to answer that question.

Approaching something through art has the advantage of being disarming, it changes the narrative and it can change your perspective. We have this advantage for anyone who works in a creative field or considers themselves creative or has a brain, we have these opportunities to creative approach this.

The safe thing to do would have been to stay sympathetic, to just keep the bumper sticker and a donation and call it a day. But there was no depth to that and this felt to important to stand on the sidelines for. I didn't know what I was going to do but I started to think of ideas.

We didn't go there because we thought we were going to solve anything, we didn't go to feel good about ourselves. We went to help people amplify their voices, we wanted to acknowledge their lived experience without judgement and we wanted to stand in solidarity and say; "Yeah! You know what, you're right, this isn't fair, this shouldn't be happening and I'm going to be here with you."- that's Empathy.