Tabina tariq
Growing up, I couldn’t watch violence. Blood, injuries, even someone getting hurt in a children’s television show could make my own body react as though I were the one being cut open or slashed with a sword. It wasn’t simply that I disliked violence; sometimes, witnessing someone else’s pain made my own body feel as though it were being injured. Eventually, I began fainting in classrooms when professors showed violent scenes or documentaries without warning. Now, at the beginning of every semester, I quietly ask my professors whether our readings or screenings contain graphic violence so I know when I might need to step outside.
For years, I struggled to explain this. I knew what I felt, but I didn’t have a name for it. Then, during office hours, I was telling a professor about my sensitivity to depictions of violence when he suddenly reacted with recognition.
“Oh—you’re a hyperempath.”
I stopped mid-tangent. “Hyper-what?”
He recommended Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, experiences other people’s physical pain through what the novel calls hyperempathy syndrome. In a 1998 talk, Butler explained that she invented the condition as a fictional consequence of her character’s mother’s drug use, rather than giving Lauren a supernatural power.
“Reading the novel was the first time I encountered something that gave shape, however imperfectly, to an experience I had never quite known how to articulate.”
Reading the novel was the first time I encountered something that gave shape, however imperfectly, to an experience I had never quite known how to articulate.
Lauren describes herself as “the most vulnerable person [she] know[s],” a vulnerability she has no desire to boast about. She feels what she sees others feeling, or what she believes they feel; the grief she absorbs may not belong to her, and may not even be real, but it hurts all the same.
I recognized the frustration of that distinction: knowing that a feeling originates elsewhere doesn’t necessarily make it disappear.
But Lauren and I are not the same. I don’t bleed when someone else bleeds. I don’t experience another person’s injury as a literal wound of my own. Rather, graphic images can provoke such an overwhelming physical response that I become faint. The difference matters. Butler’s fiction isn’t a diagnosis for me, and my experience isn’t evidence that her imagined syndrome exists outside the novel. Still, the resemblance was enough to make me feel unexpectedly understood. It even clarified, in retrospect, why becoming a doctor—the future my Desi parents had hoped for me—never felt possible. I could barely withstand watching an injury on a screen; the prospect of confronting one in front of me was another matter entirely.
The novel also made me reconsider what it means to feel with someone. Hyperempathy, for me, isn’t limited to pain. When my friends are happy, I’m happy; when they’re heartbroken, I can become heartbroken too. Sometimes, if a friend tells me her boyfriend has broken up with her, I find myself thinking of it as our breakup. Not because I was secretly dating him or because I had any particular investment in the relationship, but because her devastation can become so emotionally immediate that the distinction between her sadness and my sadness starts to blur. Apparently, heartbreak is a group project.
There are psychological concepts that begin to describe parts of this experience. Emotional contagion, for instance, refers to the tendency to catch or come to share another person’s emotional state. Affective empathy concerns emotional responses to another person’s feelings. These concepts aren’t interchangeable with Lauren’s fictional syndrome, nor do they establish what causes my own reactions. But they offer a vocabulary for thinking about how another person’s emotional life can reverberate within our own.
“The grief she absorbs may not belong to her, and may not even be real, but it hurts all the same.”
What interests me most, though, is the question Butler raises about the relationship between empathy and vulnerability. Lauren cannot simply decide to stop feeling. Her father seems to believe she ought to be able to overcome her condition, but the novel makes clear that willing herself to become numb isn’t a straightforward solution. Her hyperempathy can make self-defense dangerous: hurting someone else means risking pain herself. Yet the same sensitivity also shapes how she understands the people around her. In a world increasingly organized around violence, scarcity, and self-preservation, her condition makes the suffering that others might ignore impossible for her to dismiss.
That world is fictional, but some of its anxieties feel increasingly recognizable: communities fractured by fear, people retreating behind the boundaries that make them feel safe, and suffering so constant that numbness starts to look like the only sustainable response. Sometimes it feels like everything is happening all at once: the climate crisis, uncountable wars, inadequate access to health care and resources, economic instability, political uncertainty, and the growing question of what kind of future we are actually moving toward. And I am just a college student, watching it all happen. There is something uniquely strange about being expected to build a future for yourself while simultaneously watching the future become increasingly difficult to imagine.
Maybe this is part of why Lauren’s hyperempathy feels so familiar to me beyond the literal experience of feeling another person’s pain. She lives in a world where there is more suffering than one person could possibly absorb, yet she cannot stop absorbing it. I sometimes feel a smaller version of that impossibility. It’s not that I physically experience every crisis in the world, but that I know how so much suffering can make emotional distance feel almost like a moral failure. How do you remain a person who cares when there is more to care about than any one person could ever hold? How do you stay open without being overwhelmed by everything that being open allows you to see?
I found myself thinking about this whenever I encountered a gruesome passage. Lauren sometimes tries to avoid looking directly at injured people, limiting what she takes in. I found myself doing something similar while reading: moving quickly through descriptions of bodily harm, so I wouldn’t linger long enough to visualize them. The page offered me a kind of control that a film screening often doesn’t. I could look away, skim, or pause. Reading became not just an encounter with someone else’s suffering but a negotiation with my own capacity to witness it.
That negotiation complicates the familiar idea that empathy is always an uncomplicated good. We often praise people for feeling deeply, as though more feeling must necessarily mean more compassion. But what happens when feeling becomes overwhelming? When does sharing another person’s pain help us understand them, and when does it threaten to eclipse the distinction between their experience and ours? Lauren’s condition makes these questions literal, but the questions themselves reach beyond the novel.
“In a world increasingly organized around violence, scarcity, and self-preservation, her condition makes the suffering that others might ignore impossible for her to dismiss.”
Perhaps this is why Parable of the Sower felt so personal to me. I didn’t need Lauren and me to share an identical experience. I needed a character whose struggle made my own experience newly legible. Fiction gave me a way to think about something I had previously understood only through its consequences: the faintness, the dread of an unexpected screening, the awkward explanations to professors, the strange intimacy of feeling a friend’s heartbreak as though it were partly my own.
I used to think that understanding another person meant imagining myself in their shoes. Butler made me wonder what happens when those shoes become difficult to take off. Lauren’s hyperempathy is not a prescription for how everyone ought to feel, and I don’t think the answer to being overwhelmed is simply to become colder. But her story asks us: What kind of world do we create when we treat vulnerability as a weakness to be overcome, rather than a condition through which we might learn to relate to one another?
I don’t think I have an uncomplicated answer to that question. I still sometimes wish I could turn the volume down. There are moments when I would gladly trade feeling everything so intensely for the ability to watch a movie without worrying that someone else’s wound will become my own physical reaction. But I also wonder whether learning to live with sensitivity is different from learning to live without it. Maybe the goal isn’t to feel everything or to feel nothing, but to develop enough distance to remain present without becoming consumed—to witness another person’s pain without needing to possess it, and to let another person’s joy remind me that their feelings can be shared without becoming mine.
And perhaps that is what literature can do: not tell us exactly who we are, or offer a perfect explanation for every feeling, but give us a language in which to begin asking better questions. I entered Parable of the Sower with an experience I couldn’t explain. I left with a fictional name for something familiar, a clearer sense of where the comparison breaks down, and a question that has stayed with me: What if feeling too much is not simply a problem of sensitivity, but also a way of reading the world—and what might we learn if we took that reading seriously?
I used to think reading meant looking closely at words on a page and figuring out what they meant. But perhaps reading can also mean noticing what moves through us when we encounter someone else’s experience. Lauren cannot choose when another person’s pain reaches her. I can choose whether to keep looking, whether to look away, and what I do with what I have seen. Maybe that is the beginning of an answer: feeling deeply is not necessarily the same thing as understanding, but it can make understanding impossible to ignore. And perhaps fiction matters because it gives us a place to practice that kind of attention—to encounter experiences that are not ours, feel their disturbance, and still learn to recognize where another person ends and we begin.
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