vanillapetrichor:

retailgoth-deactivated20210311:

A symptom of autism I see brushed over and mocked a lot is hyper-empathy, which is something that I experience a lot in my day-to-day life.

While it also sucks to be on the other end of the empathy spectrum, here’s why having over-active empathy can suck too.

1. If you punch a stuffed animal or throw it, I will genuinely feel a pang of pain and tell you to stop. I also constantly feel guilty for not taking good enough care of or loving my stuffed animals enough and I think about them thinking that I don’t actually care about them. I also feel guilty for leaving stuffed animals at the store, because Then They Will Never Get A Home. Do you see my problem?
2. I literally cannot handle if anyone is upset. If anyone is upset, I need to make them Not Upset or I feel like it’s my fault they’re upset. This makes me really susceptible to manipulation, because if you tell me that you are hurting, I Will Have To Fix It.
3. I can’t throw food out. It makes me feel so bad. Even if stuff is rotten, I feel so incredibly wasteful. I mean I can, but the emotional toll is WAY more than it should be.
4. If I hurt someone feelings, it will stay with me for years. It can be something minor like an insensitive joke made age twelve, but it makes me lay awake at night.
5. I can get really upset about a story or a movie I watched, where someone was unfairly treated. I can literally get so angry over certain things that I read on the fucking internet, that it ruins my entire day.

Hope someone could relate to this and I hope it informed someone as well.

i think it’s so important that people understand this bc we often get mocked or called childish for “overreacting” to stuff like movies. like my own family laugh at me when i get super tense and upset or i have to leave the room during upsetting moments. hyperempathy can be so overwhelming and it’s degrading and alienating when people take your pain at seeing injustice and laugh at it bc shock and horror, we aren’t emotionless enough