Double Empathy
finding neurokin in unlikely places
Entering the city library’s vaulted space from the street’s chaos, I take out my earphones. I breathe in silence of the kind no sound disrupts. There’s a short queue at the counter and I join it. As I get books out of my bag and put away my earphones I become convinced, don’t ask me how, that the woman behind the counter—who I have so far only seen in glances—is autistic. Autistic like me.
Blue light falls in squares. Bathed in blue and encased in dark wood desk, the librarian looks like the prow of a ship. She is surrounded by a sea of books. Her hair streams. Her voice rings out. She’s brave and vulnerable, disarmingly unarmed, at the mercy of whatever rolls in through the door.
At the front of the queue I hand over my books. Wanting to make a connection—I see that now—I start to speak. I hope it’s ok to return all the books here, I say. Some are children’s books, some for the music library. They all have different return dates.
Even I know I’m talking too much.
The librarian remains unperturbed. She passes back a bounty of words across the desk to balance mine—telling me about the different boxes for putting different kinds of books in, describing the system that ensures everything gets to where it’s going—until we are equally weighted, holding handfuls of thought, laden with ideas like gifts.
Inside one of the books there’s the name of a different library, printed on the slip where they stamp the dates.
‘Ah, Portobello,’ she says. ‘The last time I was there my child bit someone, so we haven’t been back.’
We laugh.
‘Happens to the best of us,’ I say.
While the ‘medical model’ tells us that autism is a cluster of deficits in social communication that need treatment, many autistic scholars and activists believe it’s better understood as an instance of human diversity. If autism becomes a problem for the autistic person, it is always in relation to their environment. Luke Beardon expresses this as: ‘autism + environment = outcome’.
According to the medical view, which is based on nonautistic people observing autistic behaviour, my conversation with the librarian might have looked like awkward small talk, perhaps followed by unearned intimacy. But that isn’t how it felt. From inside there was real connection. We were communicating autistically. We were recognising each other. We were commiserating about the common autistic experience of having (autistic) children who sometimes become so stressed they lose the plot in libraries: having to deal with the fallout from that.
Autistic scholar Damian Milton speaks to this autistic connection with his theory of ‘double empathy’. His idea is that autistic people, like nonautistics, are able to connect very well with people who share their neurotype. Misunderstandings happen when autistic people and nonautistic people attempt to communicate with each other. Though this is a difficulty for both groups, it doesn’t affect both groups equally. Because autistic people are in the minority, our ways of communicating are not seen as equally valid. Where we lack empathy for neurotypical people, that’s our problem. And when neurotypical people lack empathy for us, that’s also our problem.
This is intersectional, of course. When the autistic person is also a member of another minority group—is a person of colour, or physically disabled, or nonspeaking—the possibility of authentic expression, and of being accurately heard, is further curtailed.
Despite much careful thought and research from autistic people and their allies, there’s still this idea floating around that autistic people lack empathy. When eminent professors say this, and culture reflects it, it’s hard to believe your own experience. That’s why such ideas are so harmful. They make you doubt yourself. They stop you from knowing what you know. That’s why I wanted to share an instance of autistic connection here. After all, if I can’t trust the evidence of my own senses, what can I trust?
At the reservations shelf, I look down the length of my own foreshortened body. I’m wearing a stripy t-shirt and jeans. I can see the ends of my hair which is cut into a nondescript sort of bob. I’m not sure how the librarian recognised me as kin, but I’m sure she did, just as I recognised her.
I take my reservations to the counter.
I have a book about neurodivergence and a novel. The same librarian is there behind the desk, so I hide the neurodivergent book beneath the other one. The librarian stamps the books. When she hands them back to me, she puts the neurodivergent book back on top.
‘Looks interesting,’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘She’s good.’
I want to tell the librarian to read it. I want to say that it’s written for the parents of children who bite people in libraries, that the book’s author has a child just like hers, just like mine. Instead I mumble a goodbye. I look in the general direction of the librarian’s face. The librarian looks in the general direction of my face.
In his poem ‘The Scottish Constitution’ Robert Crawford writes of those who are ‘shy, tongue-tied, then eloquent, / Catching your eye and holding it forever’. The librarian and I don’t catch each other’s eyes of course. (Because, yuck! Why would you?) But it’s still true. Even if it was invisible from outside, even if it looked like nothing, a connection just got made.
As I step back out into the grind of a Saturday afternoon, putting my earphones in, I’m still smiling.