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Rachael Chandler

Professor Cherry

ENGL2089-025

June 19, 2017

Telepathy, Autobiography, and Empathy

Denotatively, the definition of literacy is the quality or state of being literate, especially

the ability to read and write (Literacy). Makes sense; thats probably what most people think

of when they hear the word. Literacy is a scale and not an attribute, as there are different levels

of readers and writers. For instance, my seventeen-year-old brother can probably read all of the

same things I can, and he can write in a mechanically sound way just like I can, but if you were

to compare our comprehension, depth of writing, analysis, etc. youd find a large gap between

our abilities and would conclude that I am more literate than my brother. So, literacy shouldnt

just be about mechanics and grammar.

Why do we read and write? Of course, there are many reasons that are different for each

person, but at the core there is a reason, or perhaps reasons, that humanity as a whole has

accepted these activities as something we do and something that is important. Id argue, and this

is where I will begin to stray from hard facts into conjecture, that we read and write for some of

the same reasons that we talk to strangers at bars, go to drastic measures to find mates, and are

unsatisfied and unfulfilled with our current hookup culture. One of the greatest desires of man is

to know and be known by others, and reading and writing are just another avenue to accomplish

that.
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So, literacy should be more than being able to read Shakespeare or write a five-paragraph

essay. Stephen King calls it telepathy, Donald Murray calls it autobiography, I call it empathy.

All of these words simply convey that I am trying to get what is in my head thoughts, feelings,

points of views into yours, and you are doing the same to me. This is not to say that the basics

grammar, basic reading, and spelling arent important, we obviously need a consistent

medium with which to try and relay ourselves to one another, but those are just the basics. You

wont produce anything profound with only the basics and no feeling, but you also cant produce

anything profound without them as a foundation. Its obviously very important to learn those

things and I, for one, learn very well by observation.

Plenty of children dislike reading, and I was not an exception. Taking the example set by

my older brothers, and fueled with a distaste for sitting still, I constantly wriggled out of my

chair and refused to read more than a paragraph without the favor being returned by a parent.

Everything we read sounded better coming out of someone elses mouth, someone who had

proper control of their tongue and didnt have to painstakingly sound out words four times before

they became recognizable. It wasnt until I learned to read and wear the lives of the

characters I [inhabited] (Murray 8) that I became addicted. At some point, I started to pick up

books that could make me feel things, books with characters whose lives I could put on for

myself. It didnt matter what: I could spend days elated by the joyous reunion of two of my

favorite characters and then choose a book that would leave me depressed to the point of not

eating or sleeping well by the hopelessness laid before me in writing. I didnt know it at the time,

of course, but through reading I was developing the ability to identify with and take on the

emotions and reasoning presented to me.

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This ability became very important as I entered junior high. I began to read more

complex pieces and see humanity in the pages instead of just characters. I read and reread books,

excited to go through again with the foreknowledge of motivations for each character so I could

see how different people reacted to the same stimuli. As a kid with social anxiety and depression,

and more specifically a kid who didnt know I had social anxiety and depression, this

meeting of the minds (106), as King puts it, was very important to me because I wasnt as

able to meet with people. I learned to interact with people and understand them through reading,

particularly through reading fiction.

In my case, reading accomplished exactly what it was supposed to: I learned how to

better know people. Because of the empathy I developed through reading fiction I am now able

to understand that people come from different perspectives and backgrounds, which affects the

way they interact with the world and make decision. This skill, though seemingly simple, is one

that seems to be severely lacking in humanity today. The barrage of news stories that show death

and destruction inflicted on the human race by other humans shows that we dont see one another

as human. We seem incapable of empathizing with anyone different from ourselves, and this

mistake will end up being a costly one if not corrected.

These realizations also extended to my understanding of my own values, namely what

my perspectives were and how those along with my background produced my reactions and

character. This is the concept that Murray suggests in his thesis, all reading is

autobiographical (10), that though we are reading another persons work, and therefore

perspective, we are only able to see it from our own lens, crafted from every unique thing that

has come to make each of us individuals. In doing so we learn more about ourselves from
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reading. I began to find, though, that reading was not enough. Reading about other peoples

emotions wasnt the same as reading about mine.

The solution to this problem I faced came for me in eighth grade. My honors English

class had two things I had little to no experience with: creative writing assignments, and a club

dedicated to writing. This is the class in which I learned how to write prose, and that my essays

didnt have to have five paragraphs with five sentences each in them, including an intro and

conclusion paragraph that both stated my thesis, but in different words. I was introduced to the

idea of writing to convey not just the ideas, but the feelings and unique stories in my head, and to

use whatever means necessary to make other people see and feel what I did.

Long after eighth grade ended, I used writing to get to know myself. I write fiction

and poetry to free myself of small truths in the hope of achieving large ones, (Murray 7). The

small truths that I often unearth about myself as I write fiction point to larger ones, as Murray

described. While writing a piece about two friends I realized that I feared I would destroy the

people I love without even realizing it, a large truth that came to fruition through a simple

interpretation of a popular song. The more I wrote, the more I learned about the depth of my

character and how intricately developed my identity had become in twenty years, though I had

hardly noticed it.

Murray describes writing as a way to help [him] cut through a jungle of thoughts and

emotions, to try to recover for [himself] what was happening (5). This is largely how I use

writing in my own life, especially in the realm of the anxiety and depression I suffer from. A

jungle is accurate to describe the tangle of thoughts and emotions that are present at any moment,

so muddled and knotted that it would be near impossible to sort through without putting down on

paper. As Murray, I wrote, I write, for therapy. Writing autobiography is my way of making
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meaning of the life I have led and am leading and may lead, (5-6). Writing dark things brings

them into the light, steals some of their power, and makes them easier to explain to other people.

By writing these things, by painstakingly choosing each word to make them fit together

correctly, I grow my ability to understand myself and others that suffer far worse loss and fear

than I do.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even

despair-the sense that you can never completely put on the page what in your mind and

heartCome to it any way but lightly, (King 106). Kings warning is especially powerful in

this view of literacy. To take literacy as the development of empathy is to take every moment of

reading and writing as a formative experience in how we relate to and view other people. It is to

take responsibility for our words and how we interpret them in light of others. Perhaps if this

sense was more developed in the general population, Malcolm X wouldnt have had to read the

horrific tragedies of his races past, and Gloria Anzalduas tongue wouldnt need to be tamed.
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Works Cited

King, Stephen. "What Writing Is." On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. London: Hodder, 2012.

103-07. Print.

"Literacy." Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 31 May 2017.

Murray, Donald M. "All Writing Is Autobiography." College Composition and Communication.

1st ed. Vol. 2. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 66-74. Print.