Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper
Since she didn&#x27;t seek out a diagnosis, her actual pathology is still up in the air and I personally don&#x27;t think autism is a good fit. The fact of the matter is, empathy can be a hard thing to develop, and I think many people&#x27;s upbringings can cause it to not fully develop even into adulthood.<p>I remember at one point sometime around the age of 20 I felt like there was something I was missing. I&#x27;ve always had a pretty good intuition and my intuition led me to explore a lot of really really sad anime. The exposure to so much tragedy seemed to kick-start my emotional processing system and I was able to interact with people a lot more authentically after that.<p>15 years later, I can now recognize the signs of an immature emotional processing center in others and I absolutely see them in her. It&#x27;s a hard cross to bear, instead of just feeling things, you have to think your way into feeling them. Your &#x27;range&#x27; is limited to a small spectrum.<p>It doesn&#x27;t affect the ability to function, there&#x27;s nothing &#x27;really&#x27; wrong with you, your emotional system <i>does</i> work. It&#x27;s just that everything&#x27;s, well, blunted.<p>Once I got my emotional center processing again, I started to recognize feelings that I had had in the past, but didn&#x27;t recognize. It&#x27;s a strange thing thinking back to your childhood and realizing you were feeling things that you didn&#x27;t understand that you were feeling. Not entirely sure how common it is, but I do run across immature emotional processing very often.<p>Now that I&#x27;ve had this opportunity to think about it more, it&#x27;s like the cognitive part of your brain just isn&#x27;t connected to the emotional part. So much of your emotions never really reach conscious awareness. If you see a lot of really ugly, senseless, or violent crap as a kid, I think you&#x27;re prone to this kind of disconnection. Then by the time you&#x27;re an adult, it almost ossifies. You can work on it, but you have to be motivated to somehow.