Clara Törnvall

“If I hadn’t been so smart, they might have noticed something sooner. Intelligence can compensate for so much. When others perceive you as intellectually clever, they struggle to understand that you can have all these problems. It doesn’t add up that someone who is good at thinking can fail so utterly at things that are easy for others.”
― Clara Törnvall, The Autists: women on the spectrum

“Empathy researchers differentiate between cognitive and emotional empathy, where autists may have a lack of cognitive empathy — that is, they don’t immediately understand how to react in a certain situation, what the different roles are, or what is expected of them. An outsider may mistake this for coldness. But autists have no lack of emotional empathy — the ability to feel compassion, or affective empathy, which is to feel what the other person feels. On the contrary, autists feel very strongly for others, and many show great civil courage. Often, those feelings can become so overwhelming that the autist risks being completely consumed by the other person’s emotions, making them her own.”
― Clara Törnvall, The Autists: women on the spectrum