Elaine Wang posted:@Jamie Lancaster: I am autistic, and I find myself feeling a little annoyed about "lack of eye contact" being on the list you presented. I know it's unintentional, but from my perspective it felt like an insult.
See, autistic people like me are stereotyped as "callous" and "unempathetic" because we have difficulty making eye contact and don't understand facial expressions. When we understand other people's feelings, we can sympathize and want to help; it's getting the understanding in the first place that's the problem.
To me, it feels like being the only non-psychic in a society full of telepaths. If I say I don't understand telepathy, everyone starts talking very loudly and slowly as if I was a foreigner, even though I understand speech fine. (And most of them are backchatting through telepathy saying I'm stupid and slow, and quickly move away from me.)
To be entirely fair to you, if you're measuring entirely for face to face interactions between people who are usually not autistic, using eye contact as an indicator makes sense. But that hit a nerve: just because I'm not capable of empathy-A doesn't mean I'm not capable of empathy-B, and I'm kind of sick of being called a sociopath for it.
You don't really need to reply to this if you don't want to, and I'm not asking for any reply; I just had some strong feelings on the topic and needed to unpack them.
Dear Elaine,
I am so sorry that you were annoyed by my comment. This was not my intent. I'm glad that you shared your feelings with me and others on this post. We all need to be educated on the feelings of others and widen out our perspectives. So I think you for educating me. I'm sure that if I met you in person I would not feel that you were not empathetic. I have friends that are Autistic and have found that they have their way of communicating and I enjoy being with them.
I have also spent most of my adult life with the Deaf community where facial expressions have much of the meaning for sign language users. I also had to learn to modify my signing to fit the needs of the Deaf and Blind. So I'm still learning.
Thank you for sharing your perspective with me.
PS Can you enlighten me on empathy-B?