“I (don’t) know how you feel“.
How many times, when someone confesses they’re not feeling well, do we struggle to find the right words that can be comforting? The answer, at least for me, is countless.
I believe it’s a kind of automatic reflex to try to adjust someone’s mood, a kind of “first aid for words” that pushes us to intervene, ideally quickly, finding that phrase capable of solving at least part of the problem.
Saying “I understand you” is a presumptuous phrase
These situations happen to me especially when I’m at school. Yes, I am a teacher, and as such I spend a large part of my days surrounded by minors who bombard me with lines like: “Professor, I’m not feeling well,” or: “Professor, can I go out?”, or: “Professor, not today.”
I don’t know if the same applies to you, but often I find myself replying: “I understand you,” while listening to their stories. Yet, reflecting on it, it’s a rather presumptuous phrase. Because, after all, how much do I really know about how another person feels? Especially if they are an adolescent?
We adults have the conviction of knowing what young people think for a reason that seems unassailable: we were adolescents too. We’ve been through it. We’ve overcome misunderstandings with parents, bad grades, the first crush, the desire to belong to a group.
I, too, was fifteen, but not the same fifteen as my students
Yet we forget that age goes hand in hand with the world around us.
Let me give you a concrete example. I, too, was fifteen, but when I came home from school, the people I didn’t like stayed outside my room. I wasn’t aware of who had left without me, who had received more attention because they had the right body, the right face, the right life.
I didn’t compare my existence with the seemingly perfect lives of dozens of others, whether at dawn or just before falling asleep. Above all, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t because there were no means to do so.
So yes, I was fifteen, but I didn’t have the fifteen years my students had.
It isn’t always easy to resist the urge to be a guide
It’s a truth I try to remind myself of every time I enter the classroom. Although, to be honest, I don’t always manage it. It isn’t always easy to resist the urge to be a guide.
I think we adults have a strange relationship with the pain of the young. It almost seems as if we try to downplay it. We try to reassure them by saying their sadness or anger will pass, that in a few years that difficulty won’t matter, that when they’re grown they’ll understand what the “real problems” are. It’s not always simple paternalism.
Sometimes we speak this way with good intentions of genuinely trying to ease suffering. But—let me be concrete again—even a kidney stone attack passes after a while, and yet the doctor prescribes a painkiller rather than philosophizing about the transient nature of pain and confusion.
Empathy: Accepting that we cannot know how someone feels
All these attempts to reassure fall under what many call “empathy.”
For a long time I also believed that empathy meant being able to put myself in others’ shoes. If I can imagine being you, then I can understand you. That’s how society told us. But you know what? I’m no longer sure that this is real empathy.
Perhaps we should leave the clothes of others to them, because they often don’t fit us. They squeeze in places we don’t know, land differently on bodies and have pockets where we don’t know what has been hidden. Perhaps, rather than solutions and words, we should accept that we cannot know how someone feels.
I think this is something that, for example, books do very well. When we read we don’t need a character to resemble us in order to care about them.
We can be eighty years old and moved by the story of a child, be in love and cry over pages that tell of a love that ends, never have lost someone and still feel that mourning, that lack, that emptiness. Literature lets us enter lives that aren’t ours.
It doesn’t necessarily teach us to understand others, but it takes us by the hand and helps us to look at them, to listen to them and even to endure the fact that we may not fully understand them.
Poetry as a means to leave space for others to feel
Something similar happens at school when we read a poem in class. At first, the question almost always comes: “Teacher, what does it mean?,” as if a poem were an Ikea-like piece of furniture and somewhere, perhaps in the last pages of the book, there were instructions on how to assemble it correctly.
Then, sometimes, I read a line and a student lifts their head. They might not speak, they might not share their life. There is no need for them to. I can see that that line has landed somewhere like a seed carried by the voice. It’s not necessary to know where it has taken root for it to sprout.
That, perhaps, is the key to staying close to someone who isn’t well. Sometimes there isn’t a solution, or at least not in our hands. What we can do, instead, is listen, really look at who we have in front of us, sit beside them without filling the silence immediately with what happened to us. Leave space for the other to feel, even when the feelings are negative.
A wish for the new school year
As the start of the school year approaches, there is a wish I would like to make to those who will soon return to filling the classrooms: colleagues, students, and all staff.
Not a year free of failures, without grades, without endless meetings, tests that go badly, or mornings when getting out of bed will seem like a feat worthy of a promotion.
I would like to wish everyone—indeed, to wish us—a year in which we will manage, at least sometimes, to not have an immediate answer. To have the courage to give up insisting on knowing what lies inside the other person, but rather try to make space for them, not turn our backs and walk away.
To us teachers, above all, starting with myself, I’d like to remind that behind a student who doesn’t study, who sleeps on the desk, who talks back or who remains silent, there is a story we do not know in full and therefore, we cannot judge.
My wish for the new school year is a sentence I hope to remember to say first, every time I enter the classroom: “I don’t know how you feel, but I can stay here with you, if you want“.
THE AUTHOR AND THE BOOK – Roberta Di Lorenzo was born in Friuli and earned a law degree. After a somewhat incidental experience of teaching, she realized that this was her path: she earned a degree in Italian studies and today teaches literature at a professional institute. Among her passions are aerial dance, yoga, stand-up comedy, and crime podcasts.
Dimmi che rimani is her debut novel, published by Garzanti. Matilde, the protagonist, is sixteen and has always been a perfect daughter and a model student. At some point though, without realizing it, she has begun to disappear.
What changes the way she sees the world radically is the teacher Cecilia Moretti, who could not be more different from the image of a teacher she had formed. Cecilia notices Matilde, and entrusts her with the words of poets such as Giacomo Leopardi, Sappho, Patrizia Cavalli, and Alda Merini, hoping their verses can reach where no one else has. Because that slightly awkward professor has realized that to be the safe harbor for some people, sometimes, it’s enough to feel seen.
