Mental Health

How Do We Develop the Skill of Empathy?

There is more to witnessing grief than vicarious trauma; there’s vicarious resilience

Logan Silkwood
6 min readOct 9, 2024

--

The author is in the mountains wearing a green hat, sunglasses, and a colorful tie-dye shirt with a backpack on his shoulders. He’s smiling.
Selfie of Author

A man in a three-piece suit walked up to the gate of one of the homeless shelters where I work. He wouldn’t be the first or the last to do this. He read the sign explaining the mission of our nonprofit and then stared awkwardly at a group of us who were sitting outside in the community space together.

Several of the community members expressed a similar sentiment of feeling like they were living in a “zoo”, so I went outside the gate to confront him.

“Can I help you?”

“What is this place?” he asked.

I shared a bit about our program.

“You mean, people get to live here for free?”

“Yes, it’s a homeless shelter. That’s generally how homeless shelters work. We don’t charge rent to survive,” I stated the obvious. He clearly had never heard of the concept of a place where people who couldn’t pay the ever-increasing rent prices didn’t have to risk their lives sleeping on cold concrete every night.

“Do they work?” he asked incredulously.

--

--

Logan Silkwood

I’m a polyamorous, non-binary trans man (he/him). I edit for Queerly Trans, Prism & Pen, Enbyous, and Trans Love & (A)Sexuality. Twitter: @logan_silkwood.