After reading Sara Levine’s “The Self on the Shelf” and Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” it can be agreed that when you encounter an essay, ideally, “[y]ou leave the essay feeling as if you have met somebody” ( Levine 159). Like Jamison’s Empathy Essay teaches us you need more than just a pair of eye to examine and understand another individual’s pain. You need to be able to feel and think as they do, you have to be willing to put yourself in their shoes in order to understand what emotions they are going through. In Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams,” I have met a female Ob-Gyn who plays sick in order to train medical students to become great emphatic doctors. She, herself has survived an abortion and heart surgery. Through her story we learn that Jamison is not only critiquing and examining her medical students but is also placing herself on the exam table; both her medical and intellectual wounds are open to our critique as well. Throughout her essay, Jamison attempts to elicit different venues of emotion from her readers as we explore the pain of other characters like Stephanie Phillips, an STD Grandma, Blackout Buddy, Pregnant Lila, Leslie Jamison herself and her brother’s Bell Palsy. Jamison’s honesty and openess is what allows her to be open to critique and thus evoking empathy towards her situation.

Some of the lines I believe allow her personality to communicate through her writing is “I thought of the little fetus…honestly wondered – if I felt attached to it yet. I wasn’t sure”(11), ” I felt guilt that I didn’t feel more about the abortion; I felt pissed off at Dave for being elsewhere” (11), ” I needed his empathy…to help me discover which emotions were actually there.” (13), “to feel the mechanics of her method so palpable between us: engage the patient, record the details, repeat. I hated seeing the puppet strings; they felt unseemly – and without kindness in her voice, the mechanics meant nothing…it’s invasive but not intimate”(23) and lastly “When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft” (25).

These lines reflect a personal account of Jamison’s struggles. They are intimate moments where we can relate to other’s pains. Everyone in life has many moments where they interpret someone else’s pain, they absorb emotions and sufferings of others in order to better understand the meaning. As readers and writers we are taught to put our selves on a shelf, to reexamine ourselves in another light and leave learning something new. Our words leaves an impression of ourselves as writers for others to criticize and judge however they please whether we mean to or not. Like Levine stated, “it is style that allows the essayists to make a self…[an] essayist writes his private voice for the public”.  The way we make an impression as a writer is through our words.