I have always had this strange suspicion that empathy is a myth.

Empathy feels like a god someone claimed to see. Not wanting to seem ignorant or impious, everyone else agreed. And suddenly, we all believe in something that doesn’t exist.

I don’t think I have ever felt completely understood. For even my closest friends, I am a caricature of everything they know about me. And I don’t blame them, they are too busy living their own lives. I am the same too. I understand that I cannot understand why most people do what they do. A pleasant and polite lack of understanding is the best case outcome for most friendships.

A few months back, my partner, Advaith, fell in the bathroom and injured his leg. When I heard him scream, I was scared. I ran to the bathroom and saw him lying down with a huge gash on his knee. I helped him up. The wound looked painful but I felt calm despite the blood on the floor. I googled which hospital he could go to and called a driver. Advaith seemed calm too after the initial shock and seemed to be on a work call. I insisted he go to a doctor to get it looked at so he did. I do not understand what drives a man with an inch deep gash to do a work call.

I use this story because I think I know him best. Better than I have known anybody. I can predict his jokes and I can predict my annoyance at them. On most days, I can predict his moods and if something seems off, I always ask ‘what happened?’ open to the idea that I do not know. What we have is not empathy. Understanding each other is labour. It is not a magical ability to read each other’s minds. It is commitment to conversation, patience and respect. As people who have chosen each other as partners for life, we have all the incentive.

I find it funny when people call themselves ‘empaths’. Isn’t that something someone else must do? I find the word arrogant. The belief that you actually know what anybody’s inner lives are like. My own thoughts are inconsistent and incoherent one day to another. Empathising with myself is a task I find hard. I don’t actually know how anyone feels or what makes them tick, I am guessing, based on the many people I have met or the many times I have met them. And I am usually asking and clarifying because that is the only way to know.

‘An immense world’, a book by Ed Yong on animal senses, introduced me to a word, ‘Umwelten.’ Umwelten means environment in German but more specifically it means the parts of the world that an organism is able to sense and perceive. Senses allow us to only process that part of the world and that information that helps us to continue surviving. Humans are convinced that everything that we can see, hear and experience is what is real in the world but every animal is convinced of that and is incorrect. Trying to perceive the same reality as another requires work, imagine the leaps it takes to understand each other’s myths.