Whoever can truly see someone else's pain has usually felt it first themselves. Not from theory, not from a communication course. From nights spent asking why it had to be you, with no one there to answer.
That pain, the kind you carry through alone and unwitnessed, is exactly what makes you different toward others afterward. Kinder, more attentive, more patient. Not because you learned it, but because you know exactly what it feels like to go through it on your own.
There's a strange paradox in that. The same experience that wounds a person the deepest also teaches them the one thing that can't actually be taught. Seeing the person next to you without waiting to judge them.
Nobody chooses this kind of sensitivity. It arrives as a byproduct of something nobody would willingly relive. And yet it ends up making some of the best people you'll ever have around you.
Can you actually trust empathy in someone who has never suffered themselves?