Empathy as a technique

I can imagine how it must be to feel different than your peers in high school. But that similarity I had used so far at the start stopped during my reading of The Miseducation of Cameron Post. The only similarity I carried with me while reading about Cameron Post is that I am also from a small town. But not a Montana small town. Pittsburgh was always less than a 2-hour drive away, so I never felt completely isolated from culture. If I ever wanted a city-like experience in a place with more diversity that was always accessible. Be that as it may, my friend group wasn’t at all diverse.  All straight white friends who to my knowledge didn’t know anyone of a different sexuality than hetero. Personally, I never got to know any gay people until I got to college because there simply weren’t many gay people to know in my hometown. So, the fact that this book is told from the perspective of a gay young woman who had experienced the loss of her parents at a young age as well was different for me. In some ways my adolescence was the opposite of Cameron Post’s. This was part of what made reading this book a new experience. There wasn’t a way that I could relate too it a whole lot. Furthermore, that is what made me so hesitant to write about it.

            I don’t know the first thing about how difficult it would be to grow up not straight and white. Yes, growing up in a small town can sometimes be hard but not as hard as it would be to also discover your sexuality and realize you are gay in a small town. Even as I write this blog entry, I am struggling to come up with the appropriate words to describe what it might have been like for Cameron. That’s what also made me hesitant to write about this novel.  I would also have to try not to sound ignorant about describing my feelings toward it since I know nothing about gay people’s experiences. I also grew up in a religious family at a young age, but as I got older, my parents allowed me the freedom to make my own decision to practice religion, which was also a privilege. I had not delved deep enough into the religion of Catholicism to learn what conversion camps were. It was a new and surprising read to imagine what went on in these conversion camps and how they treated and tried to force the campers to be someone else. While I was reading about God’s Promise and how they were teaching the kids there I wondered if there are still conversion programs out there in the world and started to sympathize with the LGBTQ community.  What was especially shocking was what Mark had done to himself as a result of the cruel teachings of God’s Promise. It was hard to imagine that someone could do that to themselves.  He was so conflicted that he was driven to hurt himself.  The vividness of what happens to Mark is important to shock the reader and make them realize how serious the consequences could be for someone attending a conversion camp.  Adolescents trying to figure out who they are and be themselves and even when they do feel comfortable being themselves they are told who they are is wrong and people try to force them to change.  Reading this novel was an opportunity to learn about people with different sexualities and the unique and more difficult problems they face compared to the problems I faced when I was young.  After reading Cameron Post I have a gained more perspective and empathy toward people with different sexualities as I become an ally and advocate for LGBTQ rights. I can carry the experience of reading the story to my future interactions with others. I may have not directly experienced the same things as Cameron, but I can carry my learned empathy from the novel with me. In the future when reading other books about experiences of individuals different from me I can now easier empathize with the person or character and I can use that technique. I realize how fortunate I am not to face any bullying or discrimination while trying to figure out my own identity in my adolescence. 

Alex Wolford