Empathy in action: an onstage crisis turns moving for comedian Drew Lynch
In times of trouble, solidarity can succeed where positivity fails.
How do you support someone through a tough time? Often we give advice or urge them to be positive, but what if that's impossible? Comedian Drew Lynch developed a stutter at age 20 after being hit with a softball. Over time he surmounted that stutter and regained his normal speech patterns. But recently he needed support from his audience when his stuttering relapsed onstage so severely that he fought to form sentences.
What happened next demonstrates something many of us fail to do when someone is in trouble. It’s a simple, almost mundane act of empathy in action, but the power of such support is hard to overstate. How often do we fail to apply this principle when someone we care about is in need, preferring to control the situation as a way of easing our own discomfort?
Watch what happened onstage with Lynch, and consider how powerful acts of solidarity can be — often more powerful than pushing solutions on someone in crisis.