" It's hard to have empathy and remember that, as the saying goes, everyone you meet is fighting a great battle when your attention is all taken up by being on fire right now. It's hard to find the energy to be calm and kind and to consider the divergence of experience of others when you're exhausted and trying to keep your own head above the waves and you're swallowing salt water and you have no idea where you are going to find the energy to keep kicking.

Another thing about having your own shit going on is that until you get some perspective on it, that shit feels enormous. Like the center of the universe. And it kind of is, in that nobody who is excavating a pile of trauma like that has the energy for anything except shoveling. But it becomes so all-consuming that it's easy to forget that you - and your trauma - are not the only thing on anybody else's mind, or even the most important one, because they're all really busy thinking about their own shovels.

----------"Erase, Erase, Erase" / The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September/October, 2019 "

― Elizabeth Bear