Yessss! Another childless cat lady for Kamala. ;-)
I just finished the book. While it doesn't go into autism, a fair number of reviews and things are speculating that autism is what the narrator actually has -- which strikes me as ridiculous since she was formally diagnosed, and got a PhD in psychology (thus would have been fully aware of autism as a potential thing), and also autistics seem generally to get overstimulated by typical environments where sociopaths are plagued by apathy and more likely to be understimulated.
I think what gets me most is the description of it as a learning disability around the "social emotions". From Wikipedia these include embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, elevation, empathy, and pride. (While in contrast, basic emotions such as happiness and sadness only require the awareness of one's own physical state. I would argue that pride is the same. I can totally be proud of myself all alone in my room, can't anyone?) I would add gratitude to that list. I struggled SO hard with "gratitude" as a young adult -- often people wouldn't even engage with me intellectually on the topic, I guess because they thought I just sucked for needing to start there and then their own feelings got in the way of the discussion.
Clearly both autistic people and sociopathic people ("sociopathy"... social pathy... social trouble) have some similarities in struggling to grok some of these more subtle and/or social states though. And so did I. I would argue that it's possible to go further than normal on learning pro-social emotions -- how else would you describe compersion in polyamory, or the feeling (actual feeling) of one-with-the-universe that you hear about from Buddist monks?
Hypothesis: it's a spectrum, normal/standard/average adult humans are not all the way at either end of it, and everyone learns these things in a different order and at a different pace. And yeah I think I just blew my own mind and should write a Medium article or something, if nobody has yet.
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I just finished the book. While it doesn't go into autism, a fair number of reviews and things are speculating that autism is what the narrator actually has -- which strikes me as ridiculous since she was formally diagnosed, and got a PhD in psychology (thus would have been fully aware of autism as a potential thing), and also autistics seem generally to get overstimulated by typical environments where sociopaths are plagued by apathy and more likely to be understimulated.
I think what gets me most is the description of it as a learning disability around the "social emotions". From Wikipedia these include embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, elevation, empathy, and pride. (While in contrast, basic emotions such as happiness and sadness only require the awareness of one's own physical state. I would argue that pride is the same. I can totally be proud of myself all alone in my room, can't anyone?) I would add gratitude to that list. I struggled SO hard with "gratitude" as a young adult -- often people wouldn't even engage with me intellectually on the topic, I guess because they thought I just sucked for needing to start there and then their own feelings got in the way of the discussion.
Clearly both autistic people and sociopathic people ("sociopathy"... social pathy... social trouble) have some similarities in struggling to grok some of these more subtle and/or social states though. And so did I. I would argue that it's possible to go further than normal on learning pro-social emotions -- how else would you describe compersion in polyamory, or the feeling (actual feeling) of one-with-the-universe that you hear about from Buddist monks?
Hypothesis: it's a spectrum, normal/standard/average adult humans are not all the way at either end of it, and everyone learns these things in a different order and at a different pace. And yeah I think I just blew my own mind and should write a Medium article or something, if nobody has yet.