personal post on empathy
Jun. 20th, 2013 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaFor a while I thought I was somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I'm still not sure that that's not true. But one effect of the whole “crippling social anxiety from the age of three onward” thing is that I just didn't interact with people the way I should have, and so I didn't learn the social skills that I should have learned, and I didn't learn about how other people functioned the way that I should have. And it's not like I didn't have any friends, because I did, but they were shallow friendships confined to school – I rarely had friends over or went over to other people's houses – and I just didn't get it. It seemed like everyone else had this instinct for how to deepen and maintain friendships that I was missing, and I couldn't interpret it. I couldn't crack the code.
I relate to people with Asperger's Syndrome, not because I think that my neurology is similar, but because the descriptions of their difficulties interacting that many of them give are very, very close to mine.
And this all relates to feelings, and you not wanting to have feelings, because sometimes I just don't have them. For a stupidly high percentage of my life I couldn't connect to people, and I couldn't empathize with them, and it's hard to care about other people when you are incapable of understanding anyone or why they do what they do or how they can do all of these things and it seems like you're the only one who is a freak. And I think part of it is self-defense? If you don't feel things for other people all the time, then it's easier to not care whether or not they pay attention to you.
Although I didn't know it at the time, I was also seriously depressed for about a year and a half in high school; the kind of depressed where I didn't know that I should be able to feel happy, and I didn't know that I wasn't happy because as far as I could see it, this was as good as it got and as good as I deserved. (And then it took around four months at a new school with very kind, friendly people, before I realized that these people might be hanging around with me because they liked me, not because I was a charity case.)
All of this being: I don't know, maybe something in my head got fucked up around then. If that's the case, then being dumped by the friends with whom I thought I was close because they said I was alien and unpredictable made me bitter and closed off and I stopped feeling things for a while. It was also especially damaging, I think, because I thought I understood them, and I thought that well, I wasn't normal but I could get along with normal people okay, and then they did something I didn't understand and it made me feel like an alien walking around in a person suit. And then I spent a fuckton of time alone. And in addition to being a self-absorbed, self-conscious teenager, everyone else seemed so alien that it was hard to remember that they were real. Not in a conscious way, but every so often someone would say something and it would remind me that other people are not perfect machines who are here to interact with me but are in fact real people with real thoughts and lives outside of their interactions with me. Oh, you know what it is – that made-up word floating around tumblr, saudade? It never really occurred to me. Again, I was a teenager, I thought the world took a lot more note of me than it did (and then chose to ignore me) but I wasn't interacting with people so I had fewer opportunities to be reminded to feel saudade.
So I'm much, much better now, but I still don't always empathize with people the way I should or the way I want to and I forget that that might not be normal. I'm more tolerant of the fact that other people have flaws and are self-absorbed sometimes and it's okay, but other times I just … don't care. Particularly if I'm stressed. I stop caring that they are other people, and am more concerned by the fact that they are annoying me with their plight to which I can't relate and expecting me to sympathize and do you know who you are talking to, it's me, I'm a self-interested freak, I don't do sympathy and I'm impatient and get the fuck away from me.
I relate to people with Asperger's Syndrome, not because I think that my neurology is similar, but because the descriptions of their difficulties interacting that many of them give are very, very close to mine.
And this all relates to feelings, and you not wanting to have feelings, because sometimes I just don't have them. For a stupidly high percentage of my life I couldn't connect to people, and I couldn't empathize with them, and it's hard to care about other people when you are incapable of understanding anyone or why they do what they do or how they can do all of these things and it seems like you're the only one who is a freak. And I think part of it is self-defense? If you don't feel things for other people all the time, then it's easier to not care whether or not they pay attention to you.
Although I didn't know it at the time, I was also seriously depressed for about a year and a half in high school; the kind of depressed where I didn't know that I should be able to feel happy, and I didn't know that I wasn't happy because as far as I could see it, this was as good as it got and as good as I deserved. (And then it took around four months at a new school with very kind, friendly people, before I realized that these people might be hanging around with me because they liked me, not because I was a charity case.)
All of this being: I don't know, maybe something in my head got fucked up around then. If that's the case, then being dumped by the friends with whom I thought I was close because they said I was alien and unpredictable made me bitter and closed off and I stopped feeling things for a while. It was also especially damaging, I think, because I thought I understood them, and I thought that well, I wasn't normal but I could get along with normal people okay, and then they did something I didn't understand and it made me feel like an alien walking around in a person suit. And then I spent a fuckton of time alone. And in addition to being a self-absorbed, self-conscious teenager, everyone else seemed so alien that it was hard to remember that they were real. Not in a conscious way, but every so often someone would say something and it would remind me that other people are not perfect machines who are here to interact with me but are in fact real people with real thoughts and lives outside of their interactions with me. Oh, you know what it is – that made-up word floating around tumblr, saudade? It never really occurred to me. Again, I was a teenager, I thought the world took a lot more note of me than it did (and then chose to ignore me) but I wasn't interacting with people so I had fewer opportunities to be reminded to feel saudade.
So I'm much, much better now, but I still don't always empathize with people the way I should or the way I want to and I forget that that might not be normal. I'm more tolerant of the fact that other people have flaws and are self-absorbed sometimes and it's okay, but other times I just … don't care. Particularly if I'm stressed. I stop caring that they are other people, and am more concerned by the fact that they are annoying me with their plight to which I can't relate and expecting me to sympathize and do you know who you are talking to, it's me, I'm a self-interested freak, I don't do sympathy and I'm impatient and get the fuck away from me.
