40 Days of Compassion

Everything I know about compassion I learned from a girl with borderline personality disorder.

1) Framework

Usain and Gulliver decide to race to the endzone of a football field.  Usain starts at the opposite endzone 100 yards away.  He always runs exactly 1 yard per second.  Guilliver starts at the 50 yard line, but he is tied down and is totally immobilized.  Who wins?  Answer: Usain.

How do you know?  If you’re like me, I’m guessing that you imagined Usain whizzing by poor immobilized Gulliver or you combined your common sense experiences of races and immobilized people to inuit that Gulliver was doomed.  By imagining a picture of the race and/or drawing on your broader understanding of similar cases, you were thinking semantically, i.e. in terms of meaning.  However, you could instead have reasoned using syntax.  You could have written equations for Usain’s position (x=time, y=location, y=x), Gulliver’s (y=50), and victory (y=100) then solved those equations using an algorithm like variable elimination or Crammer’s rule to see that Usain wins and Gulliver loses.  That kind of reasoning would have relied entirely upon defining your terms, then applying the rules and grammar of linear equations.  A computer could have done it.  A computer with no compassion.

Very broadly speaking, we can think in terms of meaning or by following rules (the two are closely connected).  I argue that compassion is all about semantics and emotional meaning, that it seeks to understand how another feels, thinks, and sees things to the point of even sharing those feelings, thoughts, and perspectives oneself (to a healthy limit).  Relating to others compassionately is a very powerful way to feel, think, and see.  We’ve started exploring its beautiful power and possibilities in this site.  But as my above example suggests, compassion isn’t the end game, and it’s only one of several ways to approach our goals.

I think we need a little context and perspective now.  Because compassion while wonderful is only one approach to bigger things.

2) Consequence

Enter the Borderline Personality.  I met her through a friend in college, and I first knew that something was off when I bumped into her after a nasty bike wreck and she had zero concern for me. Intellectually, she knew I was bloodied and in pain, but that knowledge gave rise to no feeling or meaning.  It was like she could watch burning puppies as detached as most people watch the news in a language they don’t understand.  Chilling.  As if that wasn’t weird enough, she was also extremely devout and extremely interested in “moral law.”  In fact, she later went on to grad school where she was a strong moral philosopher and then lawyer.  (What that says about philosophy and law I leave to you.)  So to simplify, here you have this person with zero compassion but a compensatory super-high degree of interest in formal ethics and law.  Semantics–zero; Syntax–high. Compassion–zero; Duty–high.

What was the result?  Craziness.  Every now and then when I visited a certain Midwestern city,  I would bump into her or hear about her from friends, and there would be unbelievable stories.  About how everyone at work hated her “for no reason” and she’d been fired randomly or how friends had mysteriously dropped her or how some guy had become randomly obsessed with her or she’d been oddly banned from some restaurant by “some jerk manager.”  I could always tell that there was more than met the eye to the stories, but the crazy thing was that she’d couldn’t seem to see that herself.  Like she’d start getting hit on abruptly by her boss and not suspect that it had anything to do with her telling him the most personal stories imaginable about her family and her feelings (she had no boundaries and would tell near strangers incredibly personal things).  She was also super paranoid because she had a very difficult time telling if people liked her or not.  So combined with her general rudeness she was constantly being abandoned.  But she was very generous especially to animals and children.  And she fought really hard for causes she cared about.  From what I gather she did a lot of good pro-bono work.  And even after she’d done some horrible thing like use a guy for money (which paid her way through law school so far as I could tell), she would feel guilty and apologize.

But she totally sucked at apologies.  I finally had to avoid her completely because I caught her lying to me about another friend and lying about me to that friend (I think it was some weird power play).  I knew something was fishy and was trying to back away from her at full speed, but before I could, she broke down and confessed all of her lies weeping.  I’ll never forget sitting embarrassed in Starbucks while a grown woman wept like a child before me about “how she tried to do right.”  And through a stream of tears, she tried to apologize to me but instead managed to insult me and my other friend at almost every opportunity without taking any responsibility.  It was like watching a 3 year-old self-destruct.  She’d told me enough about her mental health problems that I kind of knew that she was trying, but there was no way to tell how much or how hard.  It was literally impossible to judge her–to tell if she was simply crazy, or evil, or if she was heroically doing the best she could but was still incredibly selfish because she had zero power of empathy.  Most of all it was sad.

That experience had a big impact on the way I think about emotion, reason, and morality.  It taught me how utterly essential empathy and compassion are.  To see how deeply disturbed a life without compassion is is to underscore just how essential compassion really is.  Compassion is like oxygen to relationships.  On this blog, we can talk about how much we benefit from little visits to oxygen bars, but try taking a deep breath with a plastic bag on your face and you see just how essential oxygen really is.  You want a primer for why to study compassion: http://40daysofcompassion.com/2010/03/why-study-compassion-a-primer/ ?  Then go hang out with sociopaths or borderline personalities for a while and you’ll appreciate compassion in a hurry.  (I don’t want to oversimplify here.  I think she was also chronically depressed too.  Who knows if that was the result or product of her other problems.  And Personality Disorders are more complex than a simple lack of compassion. From what I understand, they often emerge as complex defenses to and damage from brutal physical and sexual abuse.  Her childhood seemed…)

But I also learned how far you can go without compassion too.  Like I said, as twisted as this girl was she did a lot of good as a pro-bono lawyer.  And she was good sister and protector of her siblings.  If she hadn’t clung to moral laws, I shudder to think what she might have been capable of.  With bad syntax, she could easily have turned into Hannibal Lector.  I’m reminded of the _Terminator_ movies where the robots are always being reprogrammed to switch sides.  But thankfully, as clumsily as she was there was some good in her, and as awkward as she was, I think that she was still capable of love.

Despite years and years of therapy, I don’t think she was capable of a healthy relationship or much of a friendship (hopefully, I’m wrong), but she could still work toward the good of others.  And that was love in its own oddly touching way.  She had a friend who was to put it bluntly not a pretty girl.  But the girl with Borderline Personality Disorder became obsessed for some reason (I think she could strongly relate to and did have compassion for some kinds of pain) with building the second girl’s self-esteem.  And she would always tell her how beautiful she was.  And not in a subtle or convincing way .  It took me a while to figure out what was going on to see this unbalanced girl proclaiming grandly that night was day when it came to this other girl’s looks, but it was touching.  And it was love.  Even though she was very unhealthy, she wasn’t much different from anyone else, only her reliance on the grace of God and forgiveness of others was all the more stark.  I couldn’t save her; she couldn’t save herself, and that was ok.

Still, I’ll rather ride the Mississippi with Huck Finn that god of compassion, believing that he’d literally “go to hell” breaking every law, social norm, and religious teaching of the Old South to protect a black man, his friend.

Compassion is more graceful.