Think about the clothes you have in your closet. Or in your dresser. Or in the pile next to your bed. Think about a piece that has some special meaning to you.
My mind goes to a watch that my partner (who, full disclosure, is the editor of this magazine) gave me on our wedding day, and to a loud floral shirt I would never have chosen on my own that she encouraged me to wear. Wearing the watch makes me feel closer to her; to me, it’s a more powerful symbol of our marriage even than my wedding ring, partly because nobody else knows what it means. Wearing the shirt—even just seeing it hang there in the closet—makes me feel more confident, because it reminds me that someone else has confidence in me.
What are those pieces of clothing for you? What’s meaningful about them?
These are questions that Micah Kessel, executive director of the Playground of Empathy, often poses to groups going through the immersive, empathy-building experiences he and his team have designed. Some people resist, denying that they care that much about what they wear. But the emotions slowly come out. One person has a really comfortable sweater they always pull out at the start of fall. Another has a pair of slippers their grandfather wore.
After everyone has shared, Kessel asks members of the group to reflect on what they’ve appreciated from the stories they’ve heard. Without fail, no one mentions a single piece of clothing. What they remember are the emotions.
“No one talks about the slippers, ever, ever, ever,” Kessel says. “It’s almost like a little magic trick that we get to watch every time.”
The magic is empathy. The conversation about clothes provides a way of grasping the subjective validity of another person’s relationship with the world, and thus brings us closer together.
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Kessel started Playground of Empathy with his friend Kelley Van Dilla in 2017. Van Dilla’s main work is in theater and film (they debuted their autobiographical film/play, Let Go of Me, last year at Live Arts); Kessel’s focus has been experience design (having worked on everything from escape rooms to restaurant design to art installations). Their first big project together was to build a giant shoe.
After 13 years in Europe, Kessel moved to Charlottesville “in the midst of a national tragedy,” he remembers—just a month after August 12. The city was “in a deep state of processing.” He had left his work as a behavioral design strategist in Amsterdam in order to think more deeply about the connection between emotions and education. Now that work seemed even more urgent. There are a thousand things to take away from that day, he says, “but for me personally, it was a reminder that the lack of emotional intelligence developed in our education system had become a harbinger for fascism.” He wanted to lay a foundation for the cultivation of real emotional nuance in this country.
Kessel and Van Dilla believed that empathy was a skill that could be taught and practiced. But most of what we usually do to teach empathy is profoundly ineffective. That’s because we tend to leave things at the level of facts and concepts and moralisms, while empathy has to grow from experience.
They began collecting stories of marginalization and exclusion. The stories had to do with race, gender, sexuality, disability, body type—any number of ways people mark others off as alien. Then they scripted and produced first-person enactments of those experiences that pulled the viewer into the action. Then, joining forces with sculptor and designer Annie Temmink, they built the shoe.
A vibrant thing of orange, green, and yellow stripes, tied with bright pink laces, the shoe was big enough to walk through. You entered, by yourself, and watched the videos, maybe even donning a piece of clothing that put you in the mindspace of the subject. Alone, in someone else’s shoe(s), it became possible to imagine inhabiting a different body, a different relationship to other bodies, and to recognize how different that experience must be.
The shoe was a hit. They traveled across the country with it, visiting a host of colleges and companies, talking about empathy and inclusion. In 2020, they won an Innovation Fund Award from the Harvard Culture Lab. The project has now evolved into an ambitious effort to reimagine what diversity training should look like—not a seminar, not a presentation, but an experience of other experiences of the world.
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Empathy is a tricky concept. Kessel tells me that people often nod to the German term Einfühlung—a word that literally means “feeling into” another—as the source of our definition. We usually talk about it as a matter of being able to feel what someone else is feeling. “But I think we’ve got it wrong,” he says. “I think we’ve really got it wrong.”
The problem is that, as we all know intuitively, truly feeling what someone else is feeling is impossible. “The neural network that is making up your state of being right now, that constellation of billions of neurons firing, will never be felt before or again exactly how it’s being felt by you or anyone else on earth—ever.” Every experience is utterly singular.
Kessel is part of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Lab at Northeastern University, run by the esteemed psychologist of emotion Lisa Feldman Barrett. That experience has given him a scientific understanding of emotion and empathy that deeply informs his way of approaching the issue.
If every experience is singular and it’s impossible to grasp any experience from the outside, what is empathy? It starts with what Kessel calls subjective realism: “a comfort with the realization that our reality is our own, and no one else’s.” I have to accept that my experience is not the measure of yours, nor yours of mine.
But the distance between our realities does not doom us to separation. I can become curious about your experiences. I can share experiences of my own with you. When we do that, we grow closer to one another—even if neither of us has ever felt, or could ever feel, what the other is feeling. In encountering your experience, your reality, I learn to make space for you within mine. That’s the work of empathy.
In a paradoxical way, empathy is less about entering into another’s feelings than it is entering more deeply into your own. When I deepen my understanding of your experience of the world, I come to see my experiences in a new light. We grow closer to one another as we grow to know ourselves better, and we come to know ourselves better as we become closer to one another.
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For the last year, Playground of Empathy has been contributing a regular feature to this magazine—“Charlottesville Street Style.” It spotlights local fashion, and crucially, asks the wearers why their clothing matters to them. The answers are illuminating. Some are protesting expectations. Some are declaring freedom. Some are connecting with their roots, or bringing cultures into fresh conversation with one another. Some are looking for ways to make old things new. “These clothes disclose my testimony,” said La’Tasha Strother in the summer 2021 edition.
In keeping with Playground’s mission, the point of these features is not to set an example; it is not to tell you how to dress. Kessel sometimes says that theirs is the only diversity and inclusion training in the country that does not tell you what to think. The point of what they do, rather, is to give you an opportunity to encounter another person’s experience, to open a window into the way that others relate to their clothing, and so maybe to bring you closer to them. The point is to prompt you to reconsider yourself anew.
We do not often think of empathy as having much to do with the way we get dressed in the morning. But for Kessel, our clothing can be “the great equalizer in a world of inequality: we’re all finding meaning in the items that we connect to our embodied self.” This, perhaps, is the style of empathy.