A Practice in Empathy

I will admit that I am less than the most appreciative connoisseur of fiction – my favourite book as a kid was “A Whale is Not a Fish”, a children’s science book about the biological differences between visually similar animals such as monkeys and apes and donkeys and horses. To this day I have a strong preference for archive binging and hours-long delves into “fun facts” (read: boring minutiae) that I can later cannibalize into something approaching scintillating conversation. While I do enjoy fiction, I find it to be somewhat inaccessible on occasion.

Visual fiction, that is to say television shows and movies for the most part, has its own particular hurdles. To me, the actions of the characters do not seem to follow a clear overarching logic, but rather the vagaries of some arcane random number generator – as if they were not decided by a rational, consistent mind, but merely a roll of the grand cosmic dice. I find romantic subplots in particular puzzling, as they seem to assume that a few awkward, hackneyed sentences of dialogue between two conventionally attractive leads is reason enough to declare the connection between the two “true love” without any further explanation. It is difficult, if not impossible, to identify with and care about the fate of characters who seem to act without cause or reason.

But again, I do enjoy fiction – I like it a great deal. Most of my favourite examples of fiction, however, are found in literature or in interactive fiction (video games). The interactive narrative is perhaps as close as humankind has come to letting one person live the life of another, to experience a very different existence, to act and react to a foreign set of circumstances.

The written narrative – be it novel or be it short story – is as close as we have come to letting one person inhabit the mind of another, to see their thoughts. The player and the reader are ghostly voyeurs, peering into the window of another existence, and in this small way, they know what it is to live a different life, to be a different person. People’s actions are not quite as inexplicable when one can simply read their thoughts, I find.

Fiction is a practice in empathy. It requires empathy, certainly, but it also trains it, teaches it. It lays out the process of thought that leads inevitably to action. It makes explicit what is implicit in the behaviour of others.

I was bullied as a child. Not badly, but it was nonetheless a painful experience – one made particularly so by the fact that I never understood why. One of my clearest memories from that age is my mother calmly, quietly explaining why my peers treated me the way they did. Maybe they were lonely. Maybe they were angry. Maybe they were frustrated and vulnerable and scared. Maybe they were hurting, just like I was.

If I have learned anything from stories, it is that anger is weak in the face of understanding. That hatred is impossible in the light of compassion. It is much easier to condemn others when their  pain seems incomprehensible and arbitrary – when we have no sense of the mind behind the action. Certainly, my bullies were wrong, but they were also people, given to their own folly and failures. Perhaps if someone had explained me to them, as someone once explained them to me, they would have been gentler in their conduct.

I have spent my life reading the stories and experiencing the minds of neurotypicals, and this has become a vital tool in my understanding of the world outside myself. There is value too, when neurotypicals read the stories and experience the minds of autistics. After all, communication requires empathy, but empathy, like all skills, requires practice.

Autism Spectrum Disorder – Pathways to Employment

On behalf of the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, Alberta Health Services please join us for the 12th annual Spotlight on Research Breakfast as we host:

Dr. Carol Schall
Co-Director, Virginia Commonwealth University, Autism Center for Excellence
Director, Virginia Autism Resource Centre
 
Dr. Schall will be exploring Pathways to Employment for Youth and Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by highlighting the current research regarding employment outcomes for youth and young adults with ASD. Dr. Schall has over 30 years of experience in supporting adolescents and adults with ASD as a teacher, administrator, researcher and consultant.

 
The Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital is dedicated to supporting the talented interdisciplinary teams that support our patients as they strive for independence. We believe this event will educate and inspire innovative thinking that will further help our patients with ASD and their families achieve their goals.
 
This year’s topic offers a unique opportunity to hear from an internationally renowned speaker offering tangible examples and solutions. The Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital is pleased to be hosting  Dr. Schall while simultaneously showcasing local research realized through a thriving Glenrose and University of Alberta collaboration.
 
Help us galvanize our community towards creating solutions for the health and functional challenges facing us all.
 
Click here for registration information - Early bird pricing in effect!

I have spent the past month on a whirlwind solo backpacking tour of Central America and Mexico. One of the things I love about traveling alone is that it is a huge test of my sociability as an Aspie, and I can learn a lot about myself when I am forced to constantly interact with strangers on a daily basis. And sure enough, this latest trip has taught me a few things.

Several days ago, with my trip nearing its end, I finally crossed the border into Mexico. After spending a night in the oddly fascinating border town of Tapachula, I am now in the picturesque colonial city of Oaxaca, and very happy to be here. Mexico is the only country that isn't new to me on this trip, and as such, returning to its familiar comforts is like reuniting with an old friend.

But it's not just the familiarity of Mexico that makes it such a pleasure to visit. After visiting a diverse set of countries in Central America, some cultures came across as a bit friendlier than others. For example, there was one country where I found it hard to get anything besides stone-faced reactions from many of the locals. By comparison, the easygoing charm and quick sense of humour that seem so prevalant in Mexican culture never fail to put a big smile on my face.

My first instinct would have been to simply say that Mexico is the friendlier country, but I realized that's unfair. After all, people who are more outgoing than me would probably have a far longer list of friendly countries than I do. I can be wonderfully sociable and outgoing, but my attempts at sociability tend to end up awkward and bungled with people who don't immediately come across as friendly – in other words, people who make the same impression on me that I probably do on them! Heck, I can barely smile at strangers unless they smile at me first. But if they do, I feel immediately at ease and can respond with a spontaneous, natural smile.

In other words, I can be friendly and sociable, but I'm not very good at initiating it all by myself. I'm actually pretty sociable, but my desire for human contact isn't necessarily matched in terms of my social skills – and I know I'm not the only Aspie with this particular problem. I think that's why I feel so at ease in countries like Mexico, where a genuine smile (or at least, a highly realistic one!) is a natural greeting. It immediately reduces my social  anxiety and puts me at ease, instead of making me feel like I need to go fumbling through the neurotypical playbook in search of the right social gesture to get a smile out of a stone-faced stranger.

I think this realization has helped me understand why I often feel so uncomfortable interacting with strangers back home in Canada, in spite of the number of wonderful friends and loving family members I have there. First impressions count, and initiation is crucial for forming new relationships, whether it's forcing a smile or trying to go a few sentences without saying something completely ridiculous – but with old friends and family, you can just be yourself, and not worry about initiating.

Near the start of my trip, I made the mistake of ending up in a beach town in Nicaragua that is known mostly as a place for foreigners much younger than me to drink and party. (Unfortunately for me – I just wanted to go to the beach!) One night I ended up at a nightclub surrounded by dancing, drunken, hedonistic young people. I stood stock-still, observing all the goings-on, very much aware of how out of place I was, and not entirely welcome – especially since I didn't have a drop of alcohol in my body! In the past the feeling of being out of place would have been an acutely painful one, but this time I just found it interesting, like being an alien observing the earthlings from the safety of his flying saucer.

I hope the lack of pain was at least partly due to the self-aware detachment I've tried to cultivate lately – something I wrote about a few months ago in an earlier issue of AAA – but I think it's more than that. I think that, the more I realize how much I flourish in certain social situations, the more dispassionately I can think about other settings where I am utterly out of place. And sure enough, the next day I was back to very positive interactions with extremely kind Nicaraguan people (great initiators that they are!), and the whole nightclub ordeal was just one more mildly surreal interlude in this ongoing process of self-discovery – of knowing what works for me.

Of course, I'd never claim that anyone owes me a warm greeting, especially if a stone-faced "Buenos días" is all I have to offer them at the outset. If that's all I can give sometimes, then that's about all I deserve to get back, though I'm always happy when I can get an undeserved smile! All I can really say is that I now understand better why some places feel more much comfortable than others. Now it's up to me to decide whether I'm willing to make the effort to practice smiling on cue, along with all the other important skills of social initation, in the hopes of being comfortable in a wider range of places. It would be nice to feel at home everywhere, but in the meantime, I'm happy to find those places that already do feel like home.