Huh.

[kiya]

annwyd just pointed out that my narrator may have Asperger's. She may be right -- though he does have the compensating factor of being an empath.

Huh.

(601 words on 19 over the weekend.)

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

So how the heck can one identify an empath with Asperger's ? They seem to me to pull in almost diametrically opposite directions.

[kiya]

annwyd has the advantage of me on this; maybe she'll comment. (She's also an Aspie, which probably partly provoked the comment.) *nudges her to see if she's awake*

In the scene I'm working on, he gets data -- fair loads of data -- but isn't able to interpret it. Most of the time he can make very good guesses into other people's thought processes because he can perceive the residue, but at the moment he just has data, and no ability to connect it up.

The culture actively trains people out of body language cues; if he's got Asperger's, he's as a general rule not strongly disadvantaged there, and the empathic insight can actually give him a leg up in a lot of situations. But dealing with someone whose emotional state just went "flare rumble rumble rumble LURCH ka-chunk, click" and came out at a completely different velocity is completely foiling him.

(teinedreugan correctly guessed what she was thinking first try, so I suspect the information is there in the text for someone who does have the equipment; annwyd had less luck, but did find it consistent with theory.)

[annwyd.livejournal.com]

Okay. Trying to come up with an analogy that doesn't suck here.

Imagine that whenever someone does or says something, the subtle clues of body language and expression are explained on a teleprompter atop their head. For Aspies, the words on the teleprompter are in a foreign language which they can learn to read only partially, and even that with difficulty.

Along comes Mikel the Aspie empath. He still can't read the regular teleprompter (although in his society it doesn't matter as much, because there isn't much on the teleprompter anyway). But a screen pops up over the teleprompter and flashes images instead of text. Usually he can make some sense out of the images alone, but sometimes they baffle him without the words to go with them.

[redbird]

Have you read Le Guin's "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"? One of the main characters in that story is an empath who had been autistic--the autism was a desperate attempt to keep out the overwhelming emotions of everyone around him. (This isn't a spoiler, it's stated at the beginning of the story.)

[kiya]

Gods, not for years. Wow.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's where I got my first reaction, which was that empathy would not be at all advantageous but would instead be too much input causing the person to freak right out. Of course, I am oversensitive at times and not really very far along the autistic spectrum, so it might just have been my own reaction projected onto the character.

[kiya]

It's probably also different in that you're not from a culture in which the default is presumed "telepath". :}