Other People Who Have It

Octavia E. Butler gave Lauren Olamina a condition she calls hyperempathy: she feels the pain and the pleasure she sees in other people, in her own body, without being touched. Sami Schalk’s reading of the Parable novels is the best thing written about it, and it turns on one word — nonrealist. Hyperempathy, she argues, has no real-world equivalent, and that is precisely what stops a reader flattening it into a stereotype they already hold. Except that it does have one. Autistic people have been describing it for years, under the same name, and this sheet is about what happens to a careful argument when the thing it calls unreal turns out to be somebody’s Tuesday.

What Butler built Link to this section

Lauren says it plainly, early, and without any of the vocabulary that would later be built for it.

The mechanism is perceptual, and Schalk is precise about it in a way most of her predecessors are not: what reaches Lauren is not another person’s feeling but her own reading of what she sees and hears.

In the novel’s own world it has a cause and a chart entry. Lauren’s mother abused Paracetco, a designer smart pill, before Lauren was born; the doctors file the result as an organic delusional syndrome. It is hereditary from there. Lauren is emphatic that it is not a gift, not perception at a distance, not access to anybody’s interior: The sharing isn’t real, after all. It isn’t some magic or ESP that allows me to share the pain or the pleasure of other people. It’s delusional. Even I admit that.

And she is equally emphatic that this changes nothing about what it does to her.

Butler wrote the same thought again, six years later, at the top of the second novel, and put a harder edge on it. This is Lauren at twenty-three, dreaming her way back into a family whose pain no longer reaches her.

Even pains they pretended to feel, I did feel. That is the whole of the involuntariness in nine words, with the ordinary cruelty of brothers attached to it. And on the same page, three sentences that do a different kind of work:

They refused to let me be handicapped is held to the standard and denied the accommodation, in one sentence, delivered by the person it was done to and framed as a virtue of her upbringing. It is not offered as a grievance. That is what makes it recognisable.

The protection unfamiliarity buys Link to this section

Schalk’s chapter opens by clearing the ground, and it is worth saying how much of it she clears. She identifies four totalizing readings of hyperempathy in the existing criticism — ignoring it, reading it as simply bad, reading it as a gift, and reading it as a metaphor for something else — and dismantles each. The gift readings are the ones she is hardest on, and she is right to be: they contradict what Lauren says about herself. She also names the pull behind them, and the phrase is exact.

Everything in the paragraph above is a debt this sheet owes her, and none of it is in dispute. The argument is with one move, and it is the move the chapter is built on.

This is a real and useful observation, and the chapter earns a great deal with it. A reader who has no prior category for hyperempathy cannot reach for one; they have to take Lauren’s account on Lauren’s terms, in context, which is exactly what Schalk wants and exactly what the four totalizing readings failed to do.

And then she names the counter-example, in the same paragraph. The disability that is recognised, whose cultural familiarity does the damage she is describing, is autism — by way of Stuart Murray on sentimental narrative.

She is right about that too. But hold the two claims next to each other. Autism is the familiar thing that gets flattened; hyperempathy is the unfamiliar thing that cannot be. And the page turns straight into the sentence the rest of this sheet is a reply to.

The chapter’s closing pages state it as a settled property of the object: this nonrealist disability resists the application of contemporary disability stereotypes and emphasizes the importance of context by having no real-world equivalent.

Quite real for many Link to this section

Here is the same condition, described by people who have it, under the name they already used for it.

Mirror-touch synesthesia is Schalk’s mechanism exactly: a visual perception producing bodily sensation with no contact. It is documented, it is commoner among Autistic people than outside, and it was in the clinical literature before Bodyminds Reimagined went to press. Hyper-empathy is not a fringe report either.

What the participants say about how it arrives is the part that closes the distance. The study’s authors note that the distress was often somatized — felt as injury rather than as feeling.

I feel physical pain in my body. Set that beside I get a lot of grief that doesn’t belong to me, and that isn’t real. But it hurts. One is a novel published in 1993 about a condition invented for it. The other is a person answering a questionnaire in the 2020s. They are not analogous; they are the same sentence.

And Butler’s father is a recognisable figure long before any of this was written down.

So is the household rule about what may be said outside it.

A condition kept off the street to protect the family’s standing; a parent who treats it as a thing you could put down if you tried; a child who concludes that being the most vulnerable person she knows is not something to say out loud. There is a large literature on masking, and none of it improves on that paragraph.

Whose overlay Link to this section

The obvious move now is to say Schalk got it wrong. That reading is cheap, it is available, and it is not true. Her claim is not false so much as positional, and the position is the interesting part.

Read the sentence again with an eye on its pronoun. Hyperempathy is not a disability we recognize in our current reality; readers have no previous knowledge of hyperempathy to apply. The protection is real, and it is bought with unfamiliarity — which means it is only ever available to a reader who does not have the thing. For that reader the argument works exactly as written. For an Autistic reader it inverts. We do overlay our own knowledge onto Lauren. We cannot help it. And what we overlay is not a preconceived notion; it is a life.

This is not a small adjustment to the chapter. Its central protective mechanism turns out to require that nobody in the audience lives the condition — a requirement no argument can meet, and one that quietly writes a set of readers out of the room. And the chapter is, on every other page, an argument against futures that write disabled people out.

The fairest account of how this happened is also the most damning thing on this sheet, and it is not about Schalk. Bodyminds Reimagined was published in 2018. The study above was published in 2024, and its own discussion says this:

Autistic people had been saying this about themselves for decades. The journals had not got round to writing it down. So a scrupulous scholar, working from the literature as it stood, could survey the field and conclude in good faith that hyperempathy had no real-world equivalent — because the equivalent existed only as community knowledge, and community knowledge was not yet a citable thing.

That gap between what a group knows about itself and what the record admits is the exact injustice Schalk’s chapter is otherwise so good on. It arrived from behind and took the premise.

Chronic pain, and the nearer one Link to this section

Schalk does not refuse every real-world connection. One paragraph is spent reaching for one, and it is worth reading closely because of where it reaches.

So the claim was never that hyperempathy is unlike everything. It is that no disability matches it directly, and that the useful comparison is to living with pain. What Wendell supplies is a way of holding pain that lets attention go elsewhere — a strategy of adaptation.

The two candidates are not comparable on the same axis, and that is the argument. Chronic pain resembles hyperempathy in how it is coped with: the reinterpretation, the working while it is happening, the learning to take it and keep quiet. Mirror-touch synesthesia resembles hyperempathy in how it works: a visual or auditory perception producing sensation in a body that was not touched. One is a match of coping; the other is a match of mechanism. Schalk chose the first and did not have the second available, and the second is the closer of the two.

This is an argument rather than a fact, and it is offered as one. But it has a consequence for the reading, not just for the label: if the nearest thing is a match of mechanism, then Lauren’s adaptations are not a metaphor for anybody’s coping. They are notes on the same problem.

A biological conscience Link to this section

Lauren’s brother Keith is tortured to death. In the entry that follows, she thinks about what her condition would do if it were general, and arrives somewhere she had not been before.

The Stimpunks glossary has been circling this passage for years, filed under Canary and Very Grand Emotions, next to Autistic writers making the same claim without the fiction. It has a name in our own vocabulary: justice sensitivity, an increased awareness of and emotional response to unjust actions and systems, which Autistic communities have repeatedly traced back to exactly the mechanism Lauren describes.

And the argument for it as a species-level asset is already in print in the same shape Butler put it.

Now the part that has to be said, because this sheet is otherwise one step from a superpower. Butler puts the wish in the mouth of a girl in constant pain, in a book where the condition she is wishing on everybody has a high mortality rate and gets children kidnapped because it makes them easier to control. A conscience you cannot switch off is not a virtue. It is a load, borne by whoever has it, on behalf of people who do not. Lauren knows this: Sharers who survive learn early to take the pain and keep quiet.

The wish is not this is wonderful. It is failing that, I wish I could find other people who have it, and live among them — the wish of somebody who has calculated the odds of the first request and is asking for the fallback. Which brings this sheet to the only place it wanted to go.

Lauren wrote a wish. McLaren wrote a memory. The wish has been granted; it simply was not granted inside the book, and the people it was granted to are the ones Schalk’s premise says do not exist.

The rarer register Link to this section

Schalk is at her best on something almost every other reader of these novels has skipped: hyperempathy has a pleasure side, Butler insists on it, and refusing to notice it is its own kind of ableism. Lauren gets very few opportunities in the books, and the reason is her circumstances, not her condition — I’m supposed to share pleasure and pain, but there isn’t much pleasure around these days. When one arrives, the writing changes gear.

There are two Autistic words for this and we keep both: Autistic joy, the surplus running the other way, and glimmers, which one Autistic writer ties to our passions and interests, and to some extent related to seeing justice enacted. Same neurology, opposite sign. A sheet that mounted only the sensory hell would be reproducing the deficit narrative with the valence flipped, which is the trap the empathy literature has been walking into from both directions for thirty years.

But notice what Butler does with the pleasure passage. It is not a consolation and it does not balance a ledger. How had I done without this for so long? is a question about deprivation, asked by someone whose condition is the reason she can ask it. The good side and the bad side are not two things. They are one apparatus, pointed at whatever happens to be in front of it.

Which is why the strongest line in either novel, for this sheet’s purposes, is the one Butler puts immediately after the passage about every damned bruise. Lauren has just described the worst of it — the involuntary sharing, the pretended pains she felt anyway, the delusion that hurts like hell. Then, in a dream where it has finally stopped:

It is not a toothache. A toothache is a thing that happens to you and can stop. This is how she is joined to everything outside her, and she misses it the way you would miss a sense. You cannot subtract it and still have Lauren. That is an identity claim, made by Butler, against Butler’s own harshest description of the same condition, four pages into a sequel — and it is the claim Autistic people make when they decline to be cured. Nobody had to bring it to the text.

What this sheet will not tidy Link to this section

The reading above is close to a much worse reading, and the difference is worth stating rather than trusting.

Butler’s hyperempathy is a drug injury and Autistic neurology is not. Lauren has it because her mother abused Paracetco before she was born. That is the novel’s mechanism and it matters to Schalk’s best argument — that a technology meant to cure one disability produced another nobody predicted. It has nothing to say about autism, and any reading that lets the parallel drift into an aetiology has done real harm in a well-supplied market for exactly that harm. The parallel here is to what the condition does and how it is treated, never to where it came from.

Sharers are wounded and killed by what they share. A dying stranger can knock Lauren unconscious; sharers in the novels have a high mortality rate; a sharer who is any use in a fight is useful for a few shots and then is not. Mirror-touch can be debilitating, and it does not exsanguinate anybody. Close on mechanism, not on consequence.

The exploitation parallel is an argument and is not made here. Butler has company-town bosses target sharers, and children especially, because they are easier to control. There are real analogues in compliance training and congregate settings, and reaching for them properly would take a sheet of its own rather than a clause on this one.

Schalk is right about almost everything, and this sheet needs her to be. The contextual reading, the refusal of the gift narrative, the insistence that disability is central rather than decorative, the pleasure side: all of it is load-bearing above. Taking a scholar’s evidence and leaving her conclusion behind is the worst version of the paraphrase failure, because every individual quotation stays exact while the page as a whole misleads.

And Lauren says it is not a power, which cuts against this sheet as much as against the critics. It is incomprehensible to me that some people think of sharing as an ability or a power. If defending Autistic hyper-empathy turns it into a superpower, the defence has performed Schalk’s liberal compensatory desire to recast disability as ‘specialness’ in the act of citing her against it.