I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

Facts alone won't teach you feeling

When you're trying to understand something foreign to your own life—whether it's historical suffering, a culture you weren't born into, or an experience radically different from your own—there's a tempting shortcut: read the facts, check the boxes, call it research. But Butler is pointing at something subtler and harder: the difference between knowing about something and feeling its weight.

She gathered information that seemed tangential, conversations that rambled, details that didn't fit neatly into her timeline. But these fragments accumulated into something her imagination could inhabit. It's the difference between reading statistics about discrimination and understanding the exhaustion of navigating a world built against you. That emotional truth—the accumulated small moments, the constant calculation, the weariness—can't be found in a history book alone.

This matters now because we're often asked to care about experiences we haven't lived. Butler's approach suggests that caring deeply enough to write or speak authentically about someone else's struggle requires a willingness to sit with discomfort, to chase feeling alongside fact, and to admit that empathy is work. It requires letting indirect paths and personal conversations reshape how you think, not just what you know.