People who reference the double empathy problem often treat it as a therapeutic puzzle - autistic and allistic people simply failing to sync due to mutual blind spots. What gets buried under that framing is how costly misrecognition is when it’s the baseline. There’s nothing abstract about the aftermath: where there should be mutuality, misunderstanding settles in.
I know the harm this does: chronic misattunement is isolating, and that isolation is the wound. If I seem slow or unable to trust, It’s that I have had to rebuild the internal scaffolding that makes attunement conceivable. At some point, the capacity to meet someone halfway is not just difficult - it is fundamentally altered by the accumulation of harm and the absence of repair.
Survival logic is necessary, not enviable. I didn’t choose this metric, and I won’t claim virtue where there’s only adaptation. When I audit a stranger's gaze - trying to parse if it's an unkind assessment or a signal of genuine interest - I'm running calculations that exhaust before conversation begins. Does that smile reach their eyes or stop at social performance? This threat assessment happens in milliseconds, costs hours of recovery, and I am protecting the softness that has survived this long. That is the signature of survival in a world designed for neuronormative cognition. It is grief’s residue - unresolved, but precisely catalogued.
It’s the trace of what connection cost and what I pawned to survive its absence.
The constant calculating is exhausting indeed. And it's more than not trusting others; I find it difficult to trust myself. My perceptions have been wrong so many times. Even when I think I know someone else's intent, there's always a nagging doubt.