There is Nothing Like Infertility

I've been reading posts from The Analogy Project over at Stirrup Queens for National Infertility Awareness Week.    If you haven't at least browsed the submissions, well, you should.  We are a creative bunch.

Mel explains, Analogies are the verbal door through which people can step who want to understand another person's experience.  With hundreds of analogies, we can provide a panoramic understanding of the experiences of infertility, she says.

This project has me thinking about Empathy. 

The response to infertile couples I hate the most, besides, why don't you just adopt?, is, I can't relate because I don't want kids.  This response is the most dismissive, invalidating, anti-empathetic interaction one can have.  For me to have to say to this person, well, let me give you an analogy so that you might understand my experience is too insulting, too degrading, and I actually refuse to do it.

While I agree that analogy is a tool for making connections to new concepts, there is something about analogy and employing it to simplify my experience that allows people to cheat in regard to empathy.   Empathy is a challenge because of difference.  And difference is often difficult to negotiate, especially when one is asked to understand someone else's experience from their point of view, or world view, or culture.  We tend to want analogy, or sameness, so that we can understand the other's experience in relation to our own experiences (or affect or religion or cultural traditions, etc).  But the other's experience has nothing to do with us or our experience.  How about we try to understand each other's experience for what it is, and who we both are?  Different.

There is nothing like infertility.  Difference is not something to undo to make empathy easier.    To compare it to something else is to simplify the experience. 
 
If I have to give you an analogy to make you understand my experience then you are not listening, nor are you trying to engage me with empathy.

Analogy is, however, therapeutic in the way it allows us to inject humor into our experience.  One of my favorites is an auto diagnostics analogy from Rebecca at Trying Not to Scream.  I love it because it was a moment during a stressful time that an infertile couple examined the absurdities of infertility treatments.

And for that moment, the experience of infertility became a little less heavy, a little more manageable.