The Empathy Script
One of the first things people think of when they imagine a stereotypical autistic person is someone without empathy. It’s one of the reasons that I’m constantly being told I can’t possibly be autistic. “You’re too empathetic.”
Well, I’m a novelist. I make a living writing about the feelings of fictional people, and in doing so, making real people feel along with them. But this is largely because at an early age, I had to make a conscious, analytical effort to understand other people’s feelings. It was not at all natural to me to figure out what facial expressions or body language meant which emotions. I started guessing and became better at it. And I learned to show empathy by rote, studying the script that is considered empathetic in our American culture.
“Empathy is a social script,” I say to a friend as we are walking around a park during the Covid shutdown, both wearing masks.
“What do you mean? I don’t understand,” she say.
I wonder briefly if I should take off my “mask” to show her what I mean. But I’m trying to do less of forcing myself to mask for the sake of neurotypical people, because that sends a harmful message to me about my own humanity and value to the world. Instead, I use my words. I’m good at words, I remind myself.
“You tilt your head a certain way. You make eye contact. Sometimes you cry. And then you say the words. The empathy words.”
“What words are those?” she asks.
I’m impatient because I feel like she very obviously knows the words. All neurotypical people know the words. Autists are the ones who have to learn them. That’s what therapy is for, so we can train autists to enact the empathy script that will prove that we’re human to them, to prove we have feelings and are part of the tribe.
“I’m sorry you’re going through that. That must be awful. Wow, you’re in a tough spot. I’ve been there and I know what it’s like.” I recite them without the proper emotional intonation that I know is part of the script. Because I’m trying to point out that the words, without the rest of the performance, actually don’t mean much. They don’t count. If an autistic person just says the right words, they’re accused of not being sincere. I know I was accused of that more than once in my early years.
“You just say what you feel,” she says. “And you don’t have to do face things. That just happens naturally.”
I take a breath instead of rolling my eyes, which she will be able to see even with my mask on. “It happens naturally for you. It doesn’t happen naturally to me. What’s natural to me is for my face to be my face and not to be an actor that has to be on stage all the time, with an audience of critics judging whether the performance is good enough.”
She’s trying. She really is. She’s a true friend. Anyone else would have changed the subject before this because it is clearly a painful spot for me and few people can stay there with me.
“What happens naturally for you, then? If someone is talking to you about a difficult emotional moment in their lives?”
I know what normal people do. I write normal people in my books all the time. I never considered writing someone who was actually like me, without my masking, because if I did so, I was sure they’d be considered a monster. People would tell me that my female characters are too masculine, too unemotional. Was I trying to make a statement about how women can’t act like women?
“If someone is talking about being abused, I would probably feel sick to my stomach. There would be a roaring in my ears. I’d get hot all over,” I say, and the physical reactions come to me as I name each part. “If it’s something about not feeling like they can ever be themselves, then I feel tension in my shoulders and I can feel the shaking start in my back.”
“Oh,” she says.
“But that doesn’t count as empathy because it’s not the right script. No one is looking for those reactions to prove I’m human. It has to be the face,” I say. It seems so strange to me that other people think that it’s natural for reactions to be in the face when there are so many other ways that emotion can appear in the body.
Then I admit the truth that sometimes I don’t like to admit to people who might judge me as inhuman. “But sometimes the emotions are too much for me and so I don’t let myself feel them. I wall myself off from them until I’m by myself.”
“And then you cry?” she asks.
No, I think impatiently. I don’t cry. I’m not a crier. I’ve probably cried as an adult less than five times in my life. I pound things. I lock myself in the bathroom and clench my fists. I go running for hours on end.
“Sometimes I don’t really process anything for months,” I admit. “I lock it down because it’s too much for me. And then when I do talk about it, everyone else is over it. Even the person who first wanted to talk about it. I’m always too late to the game of emotion, it seems.”
It feels good and scary at the same time to let out this truth. I’m shaking slightly as I say it. Not in my hands, but in my torso. But people don’t look there.
“Thank you for explaining it,” my friend says. “I never thought of empathy that way before.”
“These days a lot of autistic women are being diagnosed who are actually overly empathetic,” I explain. “They feel so much emotion, that’s why they have meltdowns. It’s why they isolate. It’s too much.”
“Are you OK?” she says.
“I’m fine,” I say, and we walk back to our cars. I shake as I drive home.