“Feelings” are among the hardest concepts to grasp, and even harder to reflect on enough to write about them. I once heard that the more specific art gets, the more universally relatable it becomes. I am proud of how these writers, compiling their hearts for “The Empathy B-Side,” have parsed all the tiny details of their feelings, opening their minds and lives to readers and bringing their emotions together into a collection guaranteed to tear at your heart and knit it back into one piece. It is hard to create one definition of a feeling: Everyone wears grief differently, and same goes for love, humor, horror. Thank god we have our favorite books and movies and video games and songs as shining mercies to point to and connect over with others, or at least feel a connection to these pieces that have helped us learn more about ourselves. Art serves as a constant reminder that we are unravelled and put back together at the hands and the grace of others.
Senior Arts Editor Rosa Sofia Kaminski can be reached at fiakamin@umich.edu.
‘Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk’ is a refreshing self-reflection by Daily Arts Contributor Hunter Bishop
The game “Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk” allows the player to inhabit more than just a character. You control the thoughts of a protagonist suffering from an unnamed mental illness, becoming the voice inside her head and egging her on as she attempts a (seemingly) simple task: buying milk from the store. Her anxieties build as she gets closer and closer to her goal, culminating in a teetering pile of irrational fears and worries. Experiencing this process felt eerily familiar to me, mirroring the feelings of small intrusive thoughts creeping in until I am left with a rotting heap of self-doubt and anxiety. Seeing this play out in front of me wasn’t just an interesting gameplay mechanic, it was a sort of therapy.
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‘Piglet’s Big Movie’ and my big emotions by Daily Arts Writer Kari Anderson
Like a lot of kids, I watched Winnie the Pooh when I was little, specifically the 2003 spinoff film “Piglet’s Big Movie.” I remember being most captivated not by Pooh or Tigger or Christopher Robin, but by Piglet, the small, anxiety-ridden stuffed pig. And it wasn’t until more recently that I understood why.
In 2000, there was a study published in a Canadian medical journal positing a theory that “diagnosed” all of the Winnie the Pooh characters, showing that they could all be representations of various psychological disorders. According to the study, Pooh and Tigger both had forms of ADHD, Eeyore suffered from dysthymia (depression), Owl was dyslexic and Rabbit had a form of what might be narcissistic personality disorder. Piglet, of course, was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder.
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Empathy for the emotionless: Understanding OMORI by Daily Arts Contributor Saarthak Johri
Little things seem off at the start of “OMORI”: an ominous shadow lurking in the distance, a distressing opening cutscene with the repeating assurance that everything is going to be okay, sketches colored by void-white, ink-black and blood-red. The player learns that Omori’s fantastical world is actually a fantasy — a dreamworld concocted by the true protagonist Sunny, Omori’s teenage counterpart. Sunny has been living as a hikikomori, a Japanese term for social recluse and Omori’s etymological origin, from childhood into adolescence following a traumatic experience, escaping into his dreamworld whenever possible.
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‘It feels like a costume’: Validating my cultural uncertainty with Diane Nguyen by Senior Arts Editor Katrina Stebbins
The circumstances of my birth are entirely unknown to me. As far as I know, my life started when I was about two months old, but even that is just a supposition. I’ve been told by my mother, who was told by the orphanage from which I was adopted, that I was found as an about-two-month-old baby in front of a high school in central China. The people at the orphanage (a faceless, disembodied monolith that only exists in my vague and infrequent references to it) gave me a birthday — Jan. 1, a ballpark guess — and a name that’s still legally mine even in my adoptive country, but that I never use and haven’t spoken aloud in years.
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In my feelings with film scores by Daily Arts Writer Hannah Carapellotti
Growing up, the rule in my house was that I couldn’t listen to music while I did my homework. My parents’ reasoning? That I would get distracted by the lyrics and make silly mistakes on my assignments. Looking back now they were probably right, but I found it harder to focus while working in complete silence. So I found a loophole — I could listen to instrumental music, since it didn’t have any words. My simple Spotify playlist, titled “scores for studying,” consisted of a few instrumental tracks from my favorite movies and usually was played only right before a big test. But since then, my relationship with film scores has grown into an emotional experience that I never expected.
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‘The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue’ is shelter from the storm by Daily Arts Writer Swara Ramaswamy
I expected “Invisible Life” to take me to a new world with magic, Faustian bargains and adventure. While those elements were present, I was more shocked to find my own experiences reflected right back at me. A 323-year-old woman cursed with eternal youth and health, unable to leave a mark on the world, and a man cursed with a year of life in which everyone sees only what they want in him. Where do I fit in? Apparently, everywhere.
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The exposure of human nature through Marina Abramovic’s ‘Rhythm 0’ by Daily Arts Writer Cecilia Duran
Who do we become when no one is looking? Who are we when everyone is? Oddly enough, the distinction is often blurred. A foggy windowpane, a dirty windshield, a cracked mirror. A persona is a persona regardless of the lens through which it’s being looked — it reveals itself so long as you let it. A magnifying glass, a crack on the wall, the barrel of a gun.
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This was supposed to be a piece about ‘Life is Strange: True Colors’ by Senior Arts Editor M. Deitz
I had planned for this article to be about the video game “Life is Strange: True Colors.” Released in September 2021, “True Colors” centers on Alex Chen, a latchkey kid who’s re-entering society after finally learning to control her superpowers. Alex is an empath — seriously, she can read other people’s emotions and hear their thoughts. Kinda a neat, if useless superpower, right? Except, Alex can also get overwhelmed by powerful emotions; for example, growing enraged or depressed when someone around her does. What’s brilliant — and terrifying — about Alex’s power is that it doesn’t feel fictional: Everyone claims to be an empath, after all. And being an empath in our modern world is simply exhausting.
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Sitting with words: poetry to Inspire Empathy by Daily Arts Contributor Yumna Dagher
Poetry has immense reverberating power. Verse has that ability: We keep snippets and sections of it in our minds, carry our favorite poem’s lines with us like pendants, thinking on them in our time of need.
Poetry’s elasticity, the breadth of its expressiveness given the sparseness of its text, is immeasurably powerful. Poetry can pull us from fear and ground us in our reality, but perhaps — most remarkably — allows us to sit with someone, to feel their pain, their fear, their love and the wideness of their experience.
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