As you prefer - I'm not qualified to comment, but have an interest in personality disorders and the "high empathy" point you mention happens to be resonant for me personally.
Conversation
Let's start with social stuff.
I'm fairly socially inhibited. Have a lot of anxiety traits. Hyperreliant on verbal ability.
Cause of anxiety: I have trouble with social fluency. I understand social rules implicitly, but get overwhelmed by density of info/second guess a lot.
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This may be partly due to upbringing, as I've been making major improvements in these areas over the last years and don't seem to have base-level issues with functioning.
Apart from the lack of socio-emotional latent inhibition. I have to look away from faces when talking, e.g.
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When I'm not anxious, I tend to be hyperextroverted to the point of being a nuisance to people who can't deal with high energy.
I'm talkative, intense, very larger than life, sort of effortlessly/unintentionally taking up space.
I can turn this off, but it *wants* to be on.
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That's mostly it for explicitly social stuff.
With empathy, I am ridiculously sensitive to sensory inputs and information about people in my environment, and constantly modelling people intuitively. I wasn't even aware of this until earlier in my 20s, but I have always done it.
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Autistic people experience hyperempathy, which is often intense and narrow. The whole modeling people and having trouble navigating social interaction due to density might be adaptations and overstimulation, respectively. And becoming super extroverted -- masking?
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Extroversion here is more like "my natural state," but I have learned through REPEATED failure that nobody likes me like that so just sit quietly and pretend that smalltalk is interesting.
The mask is the subdued version.
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This is how i do it mind.
But my masks are designed to *deflect* attention, not acquire any. Sometimes that means contributing a little to not be too-quiet, but in general it's a disengaging sort of interaction.
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Yes, exactly. I am either completely there or not there at all. There is no other mode.