I’ve recently learned there’s a name for a thing I have encountered all my life and been actually quite traumatised by: The Double Empathy Problem.

In a nutshell, if you’re a neurodivergent person you start from a very young age, before you can even speak maybe, trying to work out how to interact with pretty much everyone else using a system of rules and procedures which nobody ever explains to you and which seem Byzantine and inconsistent. The amount of effort you put into this is exhausting, and yet no matter how hard you try to behave exactly the same way everyone else does, and try to clarify things when you don’t understand, or try to join in with “smalltalk”, most of your interactions are judged as malicious and get you yelled at.

Then you eventually get diagnosed and work out that you basically have complex post traumatic stress from decades of this.

And so you find your people and you limit interaction with people who hurt you. You still have to exist in their world because you have to buy things and pay taxes, but otherwise … you back off for your own sanity because it seems no amount of effort to try and accommodate them will ever be acceptable to neurotypical people.

Meanwhile when neurotypical people encounter you they tell you that you are incapable of empathy, have no theory of mind, and are rude and annoying. They have tried nothing to understand you, and are all out of ideas.

Apparently I don’t understand their social rules, but unlike them I do understand irony.