Analytic Empathy

I had a flash of memory recently, in which my father was explaining to me why another person did what they did and trying to help me make sense of it, because it wasn’t natural. I suspect my father was autistic, though he was never diagnosed and would never have accepted a diagnosis. It is clear to me that he stood out socially, and in his family, for his entire life. He never fit in, was never naturally a part of any group, maybe not even with his children—especially not with his children. I suspect he was lonely all his life and that he also had that same, weird lack of understanding of loneliness that I have myself. I don’t think I know what loneliness is because I’ve never really had the opposite. I’ve never had belonging. Being alone is far more common to me, more familiar, more safe. I am always with myself, always understanding myself when no one else does. As a kid, I read books and wrote my own stories and played with the friends in those stories. Oh, I never thought of them as real. I knew too clearly the difference between real and imaginary because the real world always made me understand that my world wasn’t real, that I was barely real, and that unless I worked very hard at masking constantly, I would never be allowed even the barest entry into any social world that I could see around me. I don’t feel “lonely” because I don’t like being with other people, I don’t trust them. I trust myself—most of the time, anyway. I remember as a kid, I used to puzzle over the stories of being on a deserted island alone. Why was this something other people thought would be hard to accept? It seemed a paradise to me, especially if I could bring three books with me to read, and enough paper to write my own books. I wanted to be alone more often than I was. Why didn’t other people want the same thing? Because I am not like them.

This reminder that my father was autistic and that he was also puzzling through the motivations that “normal” people had (this is the terminology I think he would have used) triggered in me the understanding that I spent all of my life trying to figure neurotypical people out. I sat back and observed them, often as I was excluded from play. It was less that I as a child wanted to be invited to join in the play—often I didn’t really want to play games at recess because I was absurdly uncoordinated and would have hurt myself and possibly others in the process of trying. The other kids were right to choose me last for any team play when we had PE and someone had to have me on the team. I also didn’t particularly like games because I didn’t understand the pleasure of winning, at least not in that way. I liked getting perfect scores on tests, yes. But it wasn’t at all the same kind of sense of adrenaline rush and social capital that other winning brought kids. In fact, I could argue it was the opposite, and brought me negative social capital, but I didn’t care. I still liked perfect scores for their own sake. But at recess and sometimes in school when I wasn’t being challenged academically (which was often, since I remember hating being bored and being bored often because teachers wouldn’t let me read books during their boring and repetitive lectures), I would think about what other people cared about. I cared about not being bullied or physically hurt. I have always been small and my father’s physical abuse meant that I was constantly afraid of him hitting or kicking or whipping me. But figuring other people out seemed to me the secret way to avoid being abused. Or at least, with people who were less erratic than my father.

I began to study other people in earnest in fourth grade. I made mental notes of what the popular kids in particular did, trying to figure out what made them popular. In retrospect, it seems pathetic how literal I was. One popular kid was good at drawing and wrote in tiny, miniscule letters. I tried to copy him, but no, that didn’t help. No one admired my tiny handwriting (and also, I had terrible handwriting until the summer after eighth grade when I spent every waking moment practicing it). Another popular girl wore a particular style and size of jeans. I wasn’t her size at all, but I worked to save enough money to buy exactly that size and style of jeans. In high school. That’s how slow I was. I truly believed that being popular was purely a matter of wearing the right clothes. Or having the right haircut. Or the right deodorant or perfume. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to mimic people, how to tell the right jokes, or smile the right way or like the right songs and dance the way that other people danced. These things weren’t “natural” to me, and I think I actually believed that they weren’t natural to anyone. I believed that everyone was doing the same intense analysis that I was doing in every social situation so that I could do it “right” and finally be approved of socially and fit in. I suppose as a teen, I began to want to have a social group for other reasons than purely to avoid being bullied. I still didn’t think about being “lonely,” but I thought that it would be nice to have friends to do fun things with, even if I didn’t consider that the kinds of fun things that other kids did weren’t very fun for me.

After a long career as a novelist, I have wondered what it is about being autistic that made me so sure that I could write stories about normal people. And many of my stories are about normal, non-autistic or allistic people. They are that way because I didn’t know I was autistic until I was 47, long into my established writing career. But they are also that way, I think, because I became really good at analyzing other people’s thoughts and emotions. Not by looking at their faces or being able to read their body language. No, I was and am still pretty lousy at that. I had editors tells me often that I needed to add that into my dialogue because it was almost entirely missing on the first, intuitive draft of my books, which are mostly talking heads. I was good at figuring people out because it was a survival mechanism, but also because it was a puzzle I spent a lot of time working at. Each person their own unique puzzle which I figured out by looking at the clues of their behavior, their language, and their backstory.

Writing books also gave me extra time, multiple drafts, in which I could play different scenarios and figure out the one that worked the best. It took me a lot of words to get to a publishable novel (probably twice the typical one million) and that is because this is something I’m not naturally good at. Sometimes I think that we gravitate towards the things that we have to work hard at, because there is so much more satisfaction in getting good at those things. This is also probably why I became a competitive triathlete. Triathlon isn’t a sport that requires a ton of natural grace or coordination, but it’s my chance to be good at something I was so bad at in school. And in writing novels, I have a chance to pretend to the social competence and mind-reading that I am only good at with a lot of time and information to put together. It’s a thing I do.