About

This is the blog of a naïve girl, a child inside an adult body navigating a world she only poorly understands, playing games with vague and inconsistent rules.

She doesn’t understand social conventions.  When you try to explain them to her, she finds them arbitrary, nonsensical and overwhelming, but she tries anyway.  She can only understand social conventions as a set of rules, as if it was chess.  When she “fakes it”, she usually does it wrong.  She follows the wrong rule at the wrong time, or with the wrong person… or she tries so hard to get one rule right that she forgets all the others.

She expresses herself in “unexpected” ways.  She doesn’t speak the normal language of love, friendship and enmity.  People often think she is “cold”, “uninterested”, “unenthusiastic” or even “uncaring”, even when the opposite is true, and she has a hard time making her real feelings understood.  She doesn’t fully grasp the emotional impact of her words, even though she knows it exists.  She finds herself frequently saying the wrong thing without any idea of how she could possibly have offended anyone, offending again and again because she can’t figure out what the first mistake was.

Because she doesn’t understand others, doesn’t understand the rules and doesn’t express herself like others, people accuse her of lacking empathy.  This hurts her — if people give her the time to understand others she can be empathetic.  The truth is that people by definition only empathise with what they understand, and it is really their lack of empathy for people like the naïve girl, who are slow to understand and who don’t have any pretensions to empathy, that brings out these hypocritical accusations.