“Autistic people don’t have empathy.”

Right?

Wrong.

Yes, I’m sure most of you have heard this before, and unless you know an autistic person, you probably haven’t given it much thought. You may even buy into the common misconception that autistic people can’t or don’t have feelings or empathy. Or you may not have an opinion on the topic at all.

But to us, it’s a painful, alienating stereotype, and its time has come for it to fuck itself off this mortal coil once and for all. Look, the reality is that many of us represent the deepest feelers on the planet. Go ahead and groan, but it’s true; you just don’t see it.

We actually feel everything, our emotions constantly overwhelming our rational minds until we get skilled at subconsciously pushing them away, especially when we need to stay intellectually focused. As children, we have melt-downs caused by sensory overload which are often mistaken for temper tantrums. Not all of us learn to deal with them effectively.

If we also have ADHD (and according to NIH, a majority of us do), we might also miss something that would normally make us feel empathetic. Our computer brains have only so much social bandwidth at any one time.

When made aware of our repression or obvliousness, we aren’t just allies. We’re accomplices. We’ll laugh with you, we’ll cry with you, and if we can’t, we’ll be there while you do… then we’ll burn the world down to make you feel better.

What we don’t do is make emotional decisions. We tend to act on facts over feelings. We are dedicated to the altruism of fairness and justice, an outright obsession nearly all of us share. We are hyperfocused on the big picture. We are even prone to sacrifice, which incidentally makes us ripe for abuse, and I’ll be talking quite a bit more about that in the future.

Fighting for the greater good is how many of us share our emotions and express our vulnerability. We wish to create an egalitarian world in which harm is reduced to the lowest humanly possible levels.

We try to mask. We really do. Because we do care about you, and we want to express that in a language you can understand. Many of us even train ourselves to slow down and be more acutely observant of others’ need for us to show affective empathy — or emotional mirroring, but we feel too much, and it’s not easy to face it.

This is a skill taught in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and with a lot of effort, sometimes we can offer you that kind of comfort. But ultimately, our uncontrolled, unfocused modus operandi can only ever guarantee action because we don’t want either of us to feel the pain that you do. Either way, we do show that we care.

The need to act to address injustice is especially intense for those of us who have also been abused by people who actually do lack empathy. We don’t want to be like them. We develop complex-PTSD (long-term PTSD), making it difficult to determine where the trauma responses start and the AuDHD ends, complicating the treatment of both.

To illustrate my point: I watched a LOT of Star Trek growing up. In the absence of healthy parenting, I turned to pop culture — particularly science fiction — for inspiration. I still do. More recently, I’ve also become a huge Whovian.

My role models have invariably been intensely moral and often deeply feeling characters who went out of their way to keep emotion from overwhelming their decision making processes, often saving the day as a result. Today, I know them as “autistic-coded characters.”

Spock, Picard, Data, Seven, T’Pol, Tuvok, The Doctor (Doctor Who, especially Capaldi’s Twelve). These were characters whose entire arcs were all about achieving balance between logic and emotion, making tough calls with a focus on harm reduction, and never failing to be there for those they cared about as a result.

They also often epitomized the concept of using an enemy’s power against them, and taught me about both diplomacy and leverage, especially my “dad” Picard, my “daddy” Sisko, and our beloved Gallifreyan. This comes in handy when I’m engaging in my favorite kink: bullying bullies. I’ll burn the world down, remember? These characters remind me to mind the moral line.

That said as you’re getting to know me, if you don’t understand why and how I do what I do, why I say things the way I say them, and why I may sometimes push something too hard in your opinion — and you will definitely wonder at one point or another — remember that I’m not neurotypical.

And remember this piece.

It is ostensibly my mission statement.