Camryn was glad when class started. She was ready to find out what they would be working on today. When the professor posed the first question though, well she wasn’t quite sure where the lesson was headed. Empathy. Yes, she was familiar with the word. Her classmates seemed to have a lot to say about the subject, so much that she wasn’t quite sure what was left to say.

How many ways could one describe empathy? What could she say that wasn’t the same as the previous 20 answers? After giving it some thought, she raised her hand. “If you have sympathy for someone, you realize that they are hurting. If you have empathy for someone, you feel their pain. Kind of like you know what they are going through because you’ve been there too. If someone loses a family member and you’ve lost one too.....you can feel empathy for them. If you’ve never lost anyone close to you, you feel badly for them, you feel sympathy, but you don’t really know how they feel......so no empathy.”