Well, I have no idea if autism is the thing I have, of course. Analyzing the feeling of this confusion about people over the years, I’ve developed the suspicion that I actually have an ugh field around the idea of empathizing with people, rather than necessarily an inability to do so. My mind slides off the thought of trying to in the first place, and goes sort of… strategically blank, if I try to force it to empathize anyway, making it look like I’m not good at it. (And I have a long history of not being interested in other people, preferring things or ideas.)
But when I accidentally, passively empathize with people, predicting how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking without any ulterior motive for doing so, I’m usually as good at it as a neurotypical person. This implies (if it’s correct, and not just yet another confabulated explanation for my inexplicable mental patterns) that I will have to figure out the cause of my discomfort around empathizing and dismantle it.
Maybe the best way to explain my situation is that I can understand what people are thinking and feeling easily—as in the context of fiction, which I’ve always loved and read tons of—but I can’t generate it independently—exactly as if I knew a foreign language well enough to understand it when someone else speaks it, but not well enough to speak it myself.
Well, I have no idea if autism is the thing I have, of course. Analyzing the feeling of this confusion about people over the years, I’ve developed the suspicion that I actually have an ugh field around the idea of empathizing with people, rather than necessarily an inability to do so. My mind slides off the thought of trying to in the first place, and goes sort of… strategically blank, if I try to force it to empathize anyway, making it look like I’m not good at it. (And I have a long history of not being interested in other people, preferring things or ideas.)
But when I accidentally, passively empathize with people, predicting how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking without any ulterior motive for doing so, I’m usually as good at it as a neurotypical person. This implies (if it’s correct, and not just yet another confabulated explanation for my inexplicable mental patterns) that I will have to figure out the cause of my discomfort around empathizing and dismantle it.
Maybe the best way to explain my situation is that I can understand what people are thinking and feeling easily—as in the context of fiction, which I’ve always loved and read tons of—but I can’t generate it independently—exactly as if I knew a foreign language well enough to understand it when someone else speaks it, but not well enough to speak it myself.