To Feel or Not to Feel: Where is the Empathy?

At 15, my Summers were full of sunbathing with friends on trampolines, bike riding, and trips to my best friend's cabin in Gaylord. Care free and full of nature, spending most of my time outside - doing as I pleased.
Around 8 am on one of those lazy Summer days, my ignorant bliss met my best friend's voice sobbing on the other end as she told her father had died of a heart attack in his sleep. I never heard that kind of pain in anyone's voice before - she was shaking, her nose was running, and she could hardly form intelligible words. We had planned to leave that morning and go to the cabin with him that day. On the other end of the line I was silent, I stared blankly at the wall and held the phone to my ear as I listened to my friend cry. Her sister grabbed the phone and begged me to get there as soon as I could.
I found my friend crying hysterically and  hyperventilating on her front porch. The house was engulfed in grief as her mother and all seven of her siblings walked in and out of rooms, lost. It was completely heart wrenching. I had no idea what she was going through, but I was there. There to listen, to cry, to hold. I was there. I was strong. I was proud of myself.

20ish years later another best friend lost her mom. After losing my own mother the year before I knew exactly how it felt and what she was going through yet I could not be there for her or attend the funeral. I was not strong enough to deal with the empathy that I felt.

Much of my life through my 20s I seemed cold, logical and calculated. I recall not understanding some of the things that made others sad or angry, but clearly I had some level of empathy that did nothing but increase over time with life experiences.
Anybody with autism has heard the claim that we do not experience empathy and it's a hurtful claim (so many negative connotations due to the whole sociopathic aspect of it).

Is this learned? Is it conditional? Is there a varying depth of empathy as Psychology Today claims? Doesn't it display a lack of empathy to blanket label autistics like this?



Taylor, Steve, “Is Autism Really an "Empathy Disorder"?” Psychology Today, 17 May 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201705/is-autism-really-empathy-disorder.