Step into Hannah's Shoes

“I wanted someone to understand me”, which is my opinion that these words encapsulate the whole point of the novel. By opening our hearts to the traumatized and showing that you stand up for them and understand their feelings we can create stronger bonds and healthier relationships. As long as you have emotional resonance with the people around you, empathy can help us find common ground.

As Thirteen Reasons Why proceeds, we as readers come to understand that school-age suicide victim Hannah Baker, might have survived if only her friends, peers, teachers, and parents had taken different approaches to the issues of campus bullying. It is through the actions, or indeed inaction of these characters that the writer tries to impart lessons on us.

Let’s begin with Justin, the primary bully who spread inappropriate photos of Hannah across the whole school. If he and the other classmates involved haven’t been that impulsive, and put more empathetic effort into understanding Hannah’s position, simply by trying to understand how they would feel in her shoes, they likely wouldn’t have taken the actions that ultimately instigated the bullying. I feel that the lesson of stopping, taking a moment to consider the impact of your next actions and making an empathy-driven decision is a really healthy one.

However, it’s not only Justin who should take on a duty of care,Hannah’s parents and teachers also should have stood up for her instead of only subjectively using their own experiences to define the adversity she was dealing with. In several moments in the novel Hannah struggles to convey the severity of the impact this bullying is having on her, and finds adults dismissive of the issues at hand. I believe this is due to adults lacking their own personal experiences to draw upon, making them disregard the problem.

As another example from the text, Mr. Porter, acting in his role as one of the counselors in the school, suggests that he wouldn’t be able to press legal charges against Bryce, who bullied Hannah physically, unless she repeated in detail the excruciating events she had experienced. Forcing Hannah to tell him about everything that took place put her in a highly stressful position and exacerbated the pain she was experiencing. There is a lesson here about using sensitivity and care, and also that sometimes processes need to be adjusted depending on unique circumstances.

Referring to Hannah’s parents, they didn’t manage to build a strong connection with their daughter by spending enough time with her to realize that something wasn’t on the right track in her life. As we can see from the story, they knew almost nothing about her daughter experiencing bullying at school, and often times neglected the severity of the real situation until the tragic suicide occurred. From my point of view, as responsible parents, they should have worked harder to comprehend Hannah’s perspective of how she was being treated by her peers, and figure out the best solutions with her to resolve the problems.

When I finished reading the story, I came away believing that empathy is actually a skill that we can all develop through frequent practice, instead of a trait that we are born with. We don’t have to involve ourselves in every detail of a colleague’s difficulty, merely making warm eye contact to console them or simply accompanying them in the related tasks is beneficial to people who feel frustrated and hurt by unpleasant matters. Therefore, no matter which character in the book resembles you the most, I feel compassion and understanding are the utmost and critical virtues you must have to get along well with those around you.

According to what Mencius, the Chinese philosopher suggested in his Human Nature theory, we humans all have compassion, it is just that the person occasionally needs an external force like receiving education to cause this empathy to triumph over our intrinsically selfish human nature. I feel that this theory is demonstrated in this novel, with the ultimate lesson being; through practicing how to be empathetic towards other people, we can make the world a more harmonious and loving place.