blorbos from my shows

(I’m going to try to revive this newsletter. if you’d like some background on me+autism, read my introductory post, particularly the list at the bottom.)

I don’t feel other people’s feelings. Do you?

When a friend tells you about a terrible thing that happened to them and how poorly things are going in their life, do you become sad or upset yourself? Does that feeling stay with you for the rest of the day or even the week?

That doesn’t happen to me. When a friend tells me about something terrible that happened to them, I feel sadness and concern, I want to help, I think about them later and check on them. I feel glad I could listen, glad that they trusted me, and I often feel closer to them.

But I don’t feel their feelings. 

If feeling other people’s feelings is the definition of empathy¹ , I guess I don’t have it. I didn’t know that feeling other people’s feelings was even something anyone did until a few years ago, when a friend told me that she couldn’t be there for her friends in times of crisis because she didn’t like to take on all the bad feelings. And I thought, what does she mean, take them on? Why would she take them on? I had to have her explain it to me. 

You know whose feelings I do take on, though? Fictional characters. 

Why I, an Autistic Person, Contract Debilitating Brainworms About a TV Show Every Few Years 

It’s a hybrid of ADHD hyperfixation and autistic special interest. 

ADHD folks grab onto our interests HARD and squeeze all the good brain chemicals out of them until there’s nothing left. A song on repeat for weeks until we can’t stand it anymore. Jigsaw puzzles for months until we’re sick of them and throw them all in a closet. Knitting until we’ve learned every technique we want to know and we have too many hats to count.

People with autism tend to have a few interests they’re super into for years and years or maybe their whole life. 

I have always, always been into television.

When I am focused on a specific TV show, that focus lasts at least a year or two, if not more. I got really into Supernatural in late 2020, particularly the relationship between two main characters, Dean and Castiel.

In 2021 I read more than 1200 Destiel fanfics on AO3. I made weekly fic recommendation lists on Tumblr and edited other people’s fanfic before they posted it. I spent ages reading people’s extremely detailed Tumblr posts about single scenes or even single shots from the show, and wrote some posts of my own. I made fandom friends. I put framed fan art in my house and covered my bag in enamel pins with obscure references to the show. This was how I spent most of my free time in 2021.

What am I getting out of this? A number of things, but the major one is this: fiction in general and TV shows in particular are my proxy ways to process my own emotions and feel empathy.

(“but Alison,” you say, “doesn’t everyone do that? isn’t that what fiction’s FOR? maybe everyone’s a little autistic! or are too many people these days using tiktok to diagnose themselves with—” *a hand reaches out from your screen and puts a finger over your mouth* shhhhh! yes. just hear me out.)

The Processing Part

I figured out I was queer at the age of 38. This was right before I started a small business that took up most of my time (it still does), and just a few years before the pandemic thrust me into isolation, where I mostly remain. There’s a whole separate newsletter I could write about this, but I haven’t had the opportunity to explore my newly discovered queer identity or find any sort of community off the internet.

The queer parts of Supernatural live mostly in subtext² , so there was much for me to explore. Through a few smart fandom friends, I learned about the history of queer coding in film, and how queer coding is used in the show to define the relationship between Dean and Cas. Those friends and I also talked about our own queer identities and experiences. I’ve learned a lot.

For a long time, Supernatural fandom was the only way I engaged with and processed my queerness. To a degree it still is.

The show I’m focused on now is Our Flag Means Death. Stede and Ed are both queer characters, and their relationship is one of many queer ones on the show. Another character, Jim, is nonbinary/agender³ , and the way they talk about their identity really speaks to me (mild spoilers for season 1 from here on out).

In the first few episodes of OFMD, the character Jim is in disguise as a man on the crew of the ship. When they’re eventually found out, the crew are confused. “So this whole time, you were a woman?” one person asks.

“Yeah,” they reply. “I guess. I don’t know.”

This was a big deal to me. I can just…not have a gender if I don’t want to? I can reject the whole concept? I knew being non-binary or genderfluid was a thing, but those terms didn’t really speak to me. I’d heard the term agender before, but hadn’t thought about it much or considered applying it to myself until I saw how Jim handled being found out.

The normal part of this, I know, is using fiction to process an experience or feeling. Everyone gets that.

The less normal part? The disparaging looks I get anytime I fully reveal the depth and breadth of the area of my life the fandom brainworms have taken over.

• I did an entire trapeze solo about Dean and Castiel (it sucked).

• If I had had enough vacation days, I would’ve taken one the day OFMD season 2 came out.

• I read an entire novel-length thesis about the finale of Supernatural.

• I have celebrated Dean Winchester’s birthday. Twice.

• I have talked about both Supernatural and OFMD in multiple therapy sessions.

The allistic (non-neurodivergent) people in my life do not understand this level of fandom. They know people get really into particular TV shows or movies, of course. They know fandom as a hobby. But they don’t know it as an all-consuming obsession the way I experience it.

Usually I end up hiding this part of myself from people I know will respond with the surprised but disdainful, “Really?” that I hear so often and know so well. That “really?” means that there’s an Acceptable Way To Be, and once again I am not it.

The Empathy Part

I don’t feel like I have access to most people on an emotional level.

It’s a common misconception that autistic people don’t experience love, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. I vibe with very, very few people in this world, but I feel so much love for the ones I do vibe with. Sometimes I’ll look at or talk to one of those people and feel so much love for them it’s like my heart is going to burst out of my chest and terrorize an entire spaceship.

But in my heart most people feel like they’re removed from me. Disconnected.

I haven’t been as isolated in life as that makes me sound. I’ve grown up having friends and family and partners and loved ones. If you’ve met me you know I can hold a conversation, can hold COURT even, can make small talk, can hold down a job, can communicate even the most emotionally fraught of concepts. I do my best to meet the social demands of any situation. Some of it even feels normal.

Before my business partner and I opened our own aerial studio, I was actively involved at another studio in town. I ran shows, managed performers, helped with parties. One day at a studio event in the park, one of the studio’s instructors and I were putting up a volleyball net. We got to talking and I said something like, “I’m not very good with people.”

She stopped untangling the net and glanced up at me. “You hide it very well.”

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s a lot of work.”

I’ve had 45 years of practice, so being in groups of people doesn’t feel fake most of the time, and it technically isn’t, but it’s very hard work, and it exhausts me. Alcohol made it much easier in my twenties, but I developed a minor drinking problem and had to cut way back. Now I just avoid groups when I can and white-knuckle it when I can’t.

But I never know how well or poorly I’m doing at being in groups of people unless someone tells me one way or the other. I can pick up a vibe or two sometimes if it’s really obvious, but otherwise I don’t know how I’m coming off or how people are reacting to me.

Like many autistics, I’m not very good at reading facial expressions. I don’t like eye contact much, although I can make myself do it if I have to. I take most everything people say at face value, so I often miss subtext and jokes. And I don’t feel other people’s feelings. All of that makes most people in the world feel far away from me. I can see them, and I care about them, but I can’t reach them. And they can’t reach me.

When I get really into a TV show, I watch it a lot of times in a row. Last year from about June to December, I watched only Our Flag Means Death. On a loop. I know that show inside and out, backwards and forwards, and I’ve absorbed each character’s plot points, every costume they wear, every scrap of dialogue and micro facial expression.

Stories on television are of course not only told through dialogue and acting and plot. A show uses the costumes, the sets, the music to tell the story. A good show has characters that mirror each other, characters that serve as narrative foils for other ones, objects that serve as symbols of relationships or emotional arcs.

This is what it takes for me to feel feelings that aren’t my own. A story told on many levels, using multiple narrative devices and symbols, provides enough layers for me to experience the characters’ emotional journeys. Shots that frame a character’s face close up give me time to look into their eyes and parse what their expression is conveying. Repeat viewings let me absorb details I didn’t notice the first time.

I feel Stede’s alienation from his wife and children. I feel Ed’s emptiness at the thought of being Blackbeard for the rest of his life. As the two main characters come together and fall apart throughout the series, I cry when they cry, feel happy when they’re happy, feel despair when they do. When they fought at the end of an episode late in season 2, I felt awful for days. There’s a scene early in season 2 that I can’t talk about without crying.

Maybe you’ll give me the “really?” look when I say this, but it makes sense to me that I feel Ed and Stede’s feelings but not the feelings of people I know and care about. Ed and Stede aren’t real, but I’ve spent more time with them lately than almost anyone else I know. I can rewatch Ed’s face in a particular scene and take time to absorb what it means. I can take note of body language, breathing, and pauses between sentences and use that information to interpret what the characters are thinking and what they want. I can look at Stede’s eyes.

I can’t do any of that with the people in my life; their facial expressions are fleeting, and I have a hard time looking at them directly.

Please don’t interpret this as me caring more about fictional 18th century pirates than I do my friends. It isn’t that. The fact that I need a lot of processing time and information to feel emotional empathy doesn’t affect my ability to be caring and compassionate very quickly. I’m really good in a crisis because I don’t break down. And I think feeling emotional empathy for fictional characters helps me understand the people in my life better.

I just wish I could connect with more of them.

Footnotes

1. It is one definition. It turns out I’ve got cognitive empathy down but not emotional/affective empathy.

2. As a broadcast genre show from the mid aughts, representation was not Supernatural’s priority, and at certain points the network interfered when they thought Dean and Castiel didn’t seem platonic enough. I have a PowerPoint presentation about this.

3. Which is anachronistic for a show about the golden age of piracy, but if you hate anachronism you will hate OFMD, which in one episode has a character say he is doing something “for the lulz.” I’m charmed by this, but I know others are not.

A note on self-diagnosis

I’ve seen a few things going around lately doubting the validity of autism self-diagnosis, aka “isn’t everyone just weird?” aka “autism is the trendy thing.” I am in fact self diagnosed, so you’ll need to be at least a little bit on board the self-diagnosis train if you’re gonna be here. I’ve put together a few resources:

• This is an excellent video essay about the politics of self-diagnosis. If you have an hour, watch the whole thing. If you don’t, the middle third is what spoke to me most. In short: the way we look at mental illness contains bias, and psychiatry historically and currently defines mental illness not according to the internal experience of the individual but the individual’s relationship to quote unquote productive society. But who decides what productive society looks like and entails?

• I’ve read a lot of Devon Price, including his book Unmasking Autism. This article, Self-Diagnosis is the Future of Autism Assessment, sums up how I feel about it.

Additional notes

• blorbo from my shows explanation.

• I don’t want to talk about the OFMD cancellation right now.

• I wrote most of this piece listening to one song on repeat, natch.

• I would love to hear from you either via reply or in comments. If you’re viewing this in your inbox, comments are in the “read online” link at the top right of this email.