My friend had called to tell me that another friend was in the hospital. She had wanted a homebirth, but her blood pressure had risen high enough that she felt it warranted extra medical monitoring. I was busy at the time and gave the situation a perfunctory "oh, that's too bad," before moving on to the more pressing concerns of my day.

What I remember next is that I was in the car with all the kids, driving down our long country road. I tend to zone out in the car if I don't have traffic that I have to be aware of. It's one of those repetitive muscle-memory tasks, like washing dishes or taking a shower, where I disengage from the practical material world a bit, and often have insights or interesting thoughts come to me. As usual I had tuned out all the loud sounds and activity around me and was humming along in an empty brain, just being. And quite abruptly I was somewhere else. My body was still in the car with its hands on the wheel staying between the lines and going the speed limit; I was visually and tactilely aware of all that, but my inward sensing didn't match that. It was instead in a space and surrounded by people that were unfamiliar, clinical, stressed. I felt deeply emotionally sick and violated. Utter wrongness. Then maybe thirty seconds later I was just as suddenly fully back in my body, back in my car, safe, fine, hearing my kids squabbling and laughing, but still with the sick feeling lingering. A certain knowing came over me that I had just been where my friend was. I was grief-stricken.

I didn't at all have the sensation of being her; I was me, experiencing it myself. As if we had traded places. When it happened, I thought, this is what they tell us is normal. And what we convince ourselves is normal, "just the way it is." It was one of those defining moments; where you think to yourself, I am never going to forget this. This is why I continue to fight. It's not normal, it's not good, and it doesn't have to be that way.

It was a weird thing. And unbelievable. I mean, who could I tell who wouldn't think I was making things up or crazy or exaggerating a sense of empathy? So it's been something that I've kept pretty much to myself all this time. Strange to feel that a thing that made such a difference in how I see things is something I don't know how to relate to others.