Thread by @Deezovariez

When you find out you're autistic later in life its... weird. My whole life I've been memorizing the things that upset people & what I'm supposed to say or do to un-upset them, the whole time being bewildered bc the way other people process things is not the way I process things

It's difficult to talk about bc I've always had to orient myself around social rules that allistics get really wrapped up in, that they seem to just intuitively understand in a way that I don't. I end up with a lot of anxiety around shit I don't actually understand or care about

Psychs told me I isolate bc of anxiety, & anxiety is certainly part of it, but I think the bulk of it is exhaustion. It's exhausting to force myself not to rock, to look at & (attempt to) listen to other people, don't repeat myself, don't flip out if noise is happening, etc

I'm ADHD & autistic, so it's hard to separate the two. If ADHD makes me pick up more of the ambient sounds around me, makes it harder to ignore them, and then sensory issues start to build, it's hard to attribute a sensory meltdown to either individually

And I think that principle still holds for interpersonal relationships. My brain wants to do what it wants to do, it wants to think about the thing it wants to think about. I care deeply about other people, esp those I love, but I kinda... have to be reminded they exist?

I often need time to process and distance from my own needs to have empathy. I dunno how else to describe it. I can be overwhelmed with empathy for people I don't know in situations I've had time to process, but when someone is having a hard time right in front of me I panic

So I remember when I was a teenager my grandpa died, my mom was grieving, & I knew I should be supportive & comforting but I was just kinda annoyed about it. I understood why she was upset, but felt this intense pressure to "fix" the situation & since I couldn't I was frustrated

On the other hand, in my mid 20s I went on a weekend road trip for @Pragnacious's birthday. I was very involved in Palestine solidarity activism at the time. We were driving around & I just got overwhelmed with sorrow & cried "Palestinians don't get to go on roadtrips"

It's always been like that for me. I have no problem feeling deeply for people. I've been, I dunno, civically-minded my entire life? I think the point of society is to protect the whole not enrich a small portion of the population. But real-time empathy has always been a struggle

I thought there was something majorly wrong with me that I could crumble when bad things happen to strangers, but judt awkwardly panic when they happen to people I love. This was something I didn't understand about myself until I understood my ADHD, autism, & processing speed

I can spend literally years thinking about the same small handful of things, pretty much exclusively. I can process things *deeply* but not *quickly*. So with a cause I've had time to think about, like Palestine, the emotional response is instant. Without that time, I just flail

During the first year of the pandemic there was a news story about a woman who was living in her car with her 6 month old twins, which is around how old my kid was at the time, and it wrecked me. I thought about it for weeks

But when ppl in my life are suffering it can just kinda skip off the surface initially. I think in part bc in a real time situation where I'm with people, I'm doing so much systems monitoring that I can't spare the processing space for empathy right away?

I've got to monitor restless leg syndrome, sensory issues, distractions, don't rock, pay attention, DON'T ROCK, don't sway so hard, why does it feel like my muscles are fighting their way out of my skin, look at people, stop repeating yourself, what is my mouth doing, and so on

I imagine that if you don't have to manage sensory issues, distractions, bad body feels, don't have to actively make yourself seem less weird and continually enforce those self-restrictions, you probably have more brain space for social rules, norms, whatever

I'm not a computer person so hopefully I have this right, but my #ADHD & #ActuallyAutistic brain is like a computer with a metric fuckton of secondary memory & very little RAM. There's a ton of knowledge packed in there, but I don't have a reliable shortcut to quickly access it

I'm butchering the analogy, but let's say my RAM will let me have like five things running at once, one is breathing & blinking, one is whatever train of thought I'm on, one is self-regulation, etc. When an upset happens around me my brain says "whoa we're too busy for this!"

when I'm home alone & have time to recover (and don't have to use all my available tasks on Not Being Weird) I can start up whatever that upset was & start to process it. When I personally get upset tho, it forces tasks off of the queue & I'm unable to regulate emotional response

A lot of people think empathy is what makes you a good person, & that #ActuallyAutistic people are uniquely devoid of empathy. But empathy isn't an accurate measure of the morality of your beliefs/actions. Empathy is slippery even for NTs (especially *who* they empathize with)

I have issues with my real time empathy, my ability to immediately feel for someone in a way that allows me to intuitively help them. But I also have a strong desire to be an ethical person, to be kind, protective, to take care of others

It's internally awkward, but I don't need empathy or high processing speed to make ethical decisions. Depending on who your lump of salt, fat, and water deems worthy of empathy is unreliable. Rigid ethical standards are not (ofc those can be destructive, racist, sexist too)

Before you know you're autistic, it can be really distressing. You feel like you're broken because you don't have that emotional connection to what is happening immediately around you. I knew I could feel *too* deeply for others sometimes, but not precisely when ppl needed me to

Becoming a leftist really helped me w compensating for that absence of immediate empathy by giving me some shortcuts that allow me to understand one bad thing happening within a system built to generate bad things. It wasn't empathy, it was knowledge that made me a better person

To be clear, I am not saying that intelligence or even knowledge is what makes you a good person. That's far too complicated to reduce down to simple cause & effect. But for me, having *context* for the world around me helped me refine that ethical framework & respond w kindness

This is all stuff I've always wanted to talk about, but it's scary because saying you don't have empathy or have an empathy lag makes the neurotypicals think you're a scary scary [insert mental health slur]. NTs have these empathy gaps too, they just refuse to acknowledge them

My partner is also ND. Sometimes we'll both be overloaded, he starts melting down, I lock up bc I can't process what's happening & I'm trying to avoid meltdown. Partner is BPD so my empathy lag can be interpreted as abandonment. Its a real struggle in our relationship sometimes

I try to be there for him & do all the things a "good" person would do to care for someone else, but my partner senses that I'm just going through the motions (he's right) & has a BPD trauma response to it. One of the hardest things about a ND relationship is our competing needs

And to be clear I also have meltdowns and put him through tough times, he's just a lot better at quickly processing the situation and offering genuine support, whereas I will just freeze, go through the motions, & eventually get to the empathetic comforting & caregiving

We've been isolated with a toddler for over two years now, so the things affecting him also affect me. When he goes into a meltdown I'm usually headed there myself. So instead of comforting him my brain is desperately trying to hold on to my emotional regulation

Even before the pandemic pressure cooker, this was an issue. It can be hard to just make space in my limited RAM to hold a conversation with someone, so dealing with upset either pushes self-regulation out of the way or I freeze to maintain regulation despite the issues it causes