Autism Can Make You a Better Human
Most people who know a little about autism know something about the “mind-blind” theory of autism that concludes that autists lack empathy because child autists supposedly struggle to understand the concept of other people’s minds not having the same obvious information that they themselves do. Other popular theories of autism include the “extreme male brain” theory that argues that autists, whether male or female, tend to have more male traits from lack of empathy to speaking loudly and being rude. Mirror-neuron theory also suggests that autists lack certain neurons that encourage them to mimic others, which leads to lack of empathy. Yet once previously undiagnosed autistic women are added to the mix, there are many questions about the idea of lack of empathy, because female autists can sometimes be described as “over-empathetic.”
The idea that autism makes you unable to express empathy is so common that it comes up often when I tell people I’m autistic.
“You can’t be autistic. You’re so empathetic.”
Instead of realizing that autism isn’t really about empathy in any of the obvious ways that have been easily assumed, people assume that my diagnosis is incorrect, though I sought it out because I had self-diagnosed previously and wanted confirmation. I’d begun to see certain patterns in myself, from sensory sensitivity to difficulty parsing body language, a common complaint that I lacked normal facial expression by my own children, an intense need for a lot of alone time and quiet, and rules/schedules that I hated to vary from.
Because I’m autistic, and grew up being bullied and seen as “other,” I think I developed a deep understanding of the ways in which social interaction often serves those in power. Even as a child, I often noticed the other children who were likely to be marginalized. I would try to defend them, which made me even more othered. And then I began to learn empathy even for the bullies, partly as a self-protective mechanism because I needed to be able to better predict their likely future reactions. I spent hours a day trying to figure out other people’s motivations.
I’m not going to claim that I ever got very good at reading facial expressions or body language. I don’t think I ever really did. What happened instead was that I started to put other cues together. I would see a larger picture of what was going on around me, all of the children and then the adults, as well. When a teacher humiliated a child, I knew what the reaction was going to be. When I heard a group of friends arguing, I knew that someone was going to be kicked out of the group. When I saw a popular kid, I would try to analyze everything they did that made them popular. I couldn’t duplicate those things (and sometimes didn’t want to), but I could see the dynamics. I became a keen observer because of my autism, even if I wasn’t diagnosed at the time.
Because I was so socially isolated and because I like quiet alone time, I also spent a lot of my childhood reading books by some of the best observers of human nature in the world. I would read books during recess as I roamed the playground, trying to avoid bullies. In my younger years, I’d read through all of my own ten library books and would have to get my entertainment by reading my older siblings’ science fiction and romance novels. By the time I was in sixth grade, I was trying to read through all of Shakespeare’s plays. By the time I was in eighth grade, I was working through a long list of “classics,” which meant that I was able to get a “5” on the AP English test a year early, without ever taking the class.
Autism is the reason I became a novelist, and probably one of the reasons that I’m so good at getting into a character’s head. I rarely write flat characters and even my villains are fully three-dimensional because they have reasons for who they are. It helps protect me when I can guess the likely emotions that other people are feeling, sometimes even before they recognize those feelings in themselves. Sometimes even when they refuse to admit those feelings in themselves.
Because I don’t participate in social hierarchy, I also think that this frees me up from having to do a whole bunch of social labor that other people do. As a child and teen, I was mostly unaware of this labor going on in the background, except as it affected me personally when people decided to raise their own status by hurting and humiliating me. But not caring about my social position was a huge benefit to becoming more empathetic, not less so. I don’t enter interactions with other people with ulterior motives. Like many autists, you might think of me as “guileless.” I don’t lie and I don’t care enough about my status socially to use other people. I wouldn’t know how to do it and I wouldn’t want to do it for my own moral reasons. I don’t twist and manipulate and I think this makes me a better human, though I suppose we can have a debate about that. Sometimes it seems that being autistic means that people don’t think of you as really human at all.
I don’t spend a lot of time having fun or doing things that other people consider important. I’ve never been to a concert in my life (except for my kids’ orchestra concerts at the high school). I rarely go shopping for new clothes and I tend to keep wearing clothes forever if I can, so I suppose I’m good for the environment. I don’t need a new car just to show off my wealth (I don’t have any). I don’t get hurt by other people ignoring or “ghosting” me. I don’t get hurt by being told that I’m wrong when I have made a mistake (though I do very much need to correct it). I say I’m sorry easily and I don’t need to prove my worth by pretending anything. All this is to say that I’m honest and gullible and while those can be negatives in our social world, I think they are morally positive.
I also believe that talking and writing about autism in an open and honest and detailed way, ignoring prejudice and answering questions directly, has helped me to help other people become better humans, as well. By showing that there are other ways to live, and that assumptions about autism are deeply wrong and damaging to the autistic community, I believe I’ve helped neurotypical people to see the humanity in autists and I think seeing humanity in others may be the very definition of being a good human. I hope that the way I talk about prejudice against autistic people is honest, sometimes funny, sometimes sharp, but never hurtful. Because I have been hurt so many times, I am very, very careful not to hurt other people. It is the last thing I want to do.
I’ve talked here about myself and my own specific experiences, but I think much of what I’ve said here applies to many autists. We don’t always understand immediately what the “rules” are, in dating, in friendship, in school, in church, in politics. But if you explain the rules to us, we are generally more likely to comply with them than others. We want to do what is right. We are earnest, often very serious (jokes often seem unbearably cruel to us), deeply moral, and we don’t give up easily. We seek calm and safety and we care about other people, if only they can explain themselves to us in a way we can understand.
I have spent a lot of the last five years wishing I weren’t autistic, wishing I could change all the parts of me that feel embarrassing, inept, foolish, naïve, or simply defective. But on good days, I wouldn’t change a thing about myself. Not because I think I’m perfect, but because living this painful and difficult life has made me a better person, and I wouldn’t want to undo that.