Back then, I didn’t know anything about vicarious trauma, but I remember being immediately suspicious of its premise of distance. It was becoming very clear to me that bearing witness to stories of violence and death, whether in war zones or in living rooms, is to absorb the suffering of others. Whether it’s basic human compassion or some empathic telepathy of mirror neurons, in the moment of the story’s telling, witness and storyteller are bound together as if there is no distance between them. The story enters the witness and stays for a lifetime. But untethered from the original violence, the pain of the witness seems baseless. Emergent from nothing. An imagined annihilation. There is guilt and shame when standing next to the pain of those who lived through it even when the texture of feeling is the same. Not only did I survive, I wasn’t even there. Who am I to suffer? Who am I to grieve? Who am I to have a story of my own?