Hi folks.
This week, I’ll be staying in New Orleans.
By myself, in a city I’ve never been to before.
At a large work conference, all about data.
Which, I had to win a contest to get to.
A contest that involved a technical field I only just recently got into.
It’s like this week combines all the stuff that my autistic self would never have managed years ago.
But here we are: a hard road to the Big Easy.
Almost ten years ago, I began my Apple career as an iPhone Advisor.
It was my first customer service job, in a call center, taking phone calls from strangers, and de-escalating people while I solved their technical (and sometimes personal) issues.
I look through all those elements of my job through The Life Autistic lens; frankly, I don’t know how I managed!
The job required a thing that would make or break one’s success.
Empathy.
*gulp*
Of course I knew about empathy. I mean, I had the dictionary definition on hand, along with plenty of analogies to describe what it meant, how it related, why it applied to the work.
How was I supposed to learn something I couldn’t always feel?
I knew I couldn’t be reborn as a natural empath. I didn’t have the capacity to program myself that way for the job.
But I did have my own attributes that would help. Puzzle-solving. Hyper-competitiveness. Pattern recognition.
I’ll fast forward the story a bit and admit that I didn’t learn empathy.
Instead, I practiced and perfected empathic response.
It took some doing, being able to listen, hear, and read into the core of customer concerns, to frame the why behind the what of their tech issue. I made it an art, to turn those stated and unstated concerns back into a response that more or less said “I feel ya.”
Not every situation called for it, and I more than once maybe tried too hard, to my embarrassment. But it didn’t matter.
What did matter is that I had to do it. I wanted to be the best at the job. I could still come in as Hunter and take calls as H2.
It was and still is unusual to me, operating in a language that I don’t often think and rarely feel.
But then, sometimes, people will respond back.
“Exactly – you know what I mean, don’t you?”
“I know, right? You get it.”
“YES! I, you, you understand just what I’m going through.”
And then it’s like . . . I do feel it.
I don’t ‘get’ empathy. Not until I give it first.
“I don’t eat with the other teachers,” my sister admitted. “I can’t stand listening to them for more than a minute.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, today they were competing to see who had the worst auto-immune disease and then one of them said you can cure Aspergers with a powder you order online.“
I’m glad I wasn’t there, because I’d have jumped all over that one.
Really? From where? Is it cocaine? Y’all on the Dark Web? Is it high in protein? Where does a brother gotta go to get this?
Maybe it’s a misguided suburban white woman thing, but there’s a certain point at which natural remedies beggar belief.
There’s no magic cure for autism.
But really, that’s the wrong assumption to begin with.
What is there to cure?
Social anxiety? Aversion to eye contact? Empathetic difficulties? Stimming? Hyperlexia?
I’m not going to dismiss the idea of learning to cope and adapt. Far from it.
But thinking that autism is some disease or debilitating condition that demands treatment with some voodoo?
Too bad there’s no magic powder that cures ignorance.
No.
Stop trying to ‘cure’ us.
Be curious. Ask questions. Gain some understanding.
We’re always trying to understand the ‘other’ world better.
You can too.
The Life Autistic 