Emotional Dysregulation: When the Wasps Become a Mausoleum

- Guest author
Last update 27 Aug 2025
Reading time 5 mins

📚 TL;DR Autism often means feeling emotions and empathy very deeply - sometimes overwhelmingly. That’s something people often misunderstand: it’s not coldness, but rather that the feelings aren’t always shown in the expected ways. The experiences themselves can be way more intense, and they don’t always fade or in many cases never go away in the usual way. In the brain, the amygdala - the part that stamps memories with emotion - may create unusually strong connections, making experiences easier to recall emotionally with full intensity. The prefrontal cortex, which normally helps tone down emotional signals, may be less effective at damping them, leaving emotions “stickier”. And the brain chemicals that usually help feelings settle may behave a little differently due to alterated diffusion processes, which could explain why emotions sometimes hold on longer.

Autism is often described in terms of absence: emotionless faces, difficulties with empathy, rigid logic, a lack of social warmth. But reality can be very different (and usually is). What looks cold from the outside can in fact be the opposite - a depth of feeling so intense, so unfiltered that they come in bursts like tidal waves and get amplified via loops of understanding and empathy.

Consider the wasps in summer. They arrive like fairy-folk dressed in yellow-black gowns, tiny courtiers buzzing through the garden. They trim shining morsels from fruit with careful jaws, lifting them away like royal offerings. They pause to polish their delicate antennae, stroking them as if combing threads of spun gold. When one stumbles into water and is lifted out again, she shakes and then begins a ritual of restoration: rubbing each leg, smoothing each wing, straightening her striped dress until she stands whole once more. Their curiosity is bright, their patience real, and their anger rare - it comes only if someone blows on them or strikes in fear. Most of the time, they are sweet, persistent neighbors in miniature gowns, buzzing with purpose and grace. And often curious enough to allow them to be petted for a short time without a single thought to sting.

Their nest is a palace of paper, built from chewed wood and saliva, its walls softer and more vulnerable than silk, its chambers arranged like carved beautiful honeycomb halls. In midsummer it is a humming city of thousands, a living court. Yet when autumn fades to winter, the fairy-folk inside grow slower, colder, quieter. The music of wings falls silent. The palace becomes a cathedral of stillness, each chamber a crypt. What was once alive and purposeful, filled with happy buzzing and activity, is now a mausoleum of folded gowns. To most, this is only nature’s rhythm or the end of an annoyance. To an autistic heart, it can strike as unbearable grief: a wave of sadness so strong it feels as though the whole world has ended. The realization of the death of thousands of sweet individuals. Each one curled up with six legs deformed into unnatural poses after a bitter cold death. Tens of thousands of dead bodies, once the home of little souls.

This is emotional dysregulation in autism — not the absence of feeling, but the flood of it. And that is what most adult Aspergers are hiding away carefully, to not be threatened as insane, or silly, or childish, or underdeveloped. Neurotypicals often imagine autistic people as emotionless; in truth, most feel with such intensity that they cannot show it safely. Tears may flow not only for human tragedies, but even more for the winged fair-folk of summer. The same person who seems unmoved at a funeral, thought of not showing any sign of emotion (while in fact just processing way slower with the emotions never fading away) may later cry endlessly and uncontrolled until exhausted at the thought of wasps freezing in their cozy paper palace. Neurotypicals often lean on shared scripts of sympathy that provide social cohesion, but from an autistic perspective these can feel hollow compared to the raw, enduring emotions that surge from within. What looks like “lack of empathy” is instead a different and way deeper experience: way slower processing, deeper binding, way deeper emotions, endless amplification loops, and no time-fading to soften sorrow.

And here lies the paradox: autism is a disability, it isolates, it makes one an outsider. Yet almost no one on the spectrum who has no intelligence or language impairment longs to be “cured”. Cure would mean losing this depth. It would mean flattening true feeling into shallow scripts, reducing existence to hollow rituals that fade and leave no mark. To remove autism would be to remove the ability to see wasps as sweet companions, to mourn them as neighbors, to see the beauty in smallest details of nature, to feel the magic in the overlooked. To live this way is exhausting - extremly exhausting indeed - but also profoundly alive. It means the details that others filter out - the wasp combing her golden threads, the palace turning into a silent cathedral in winter - are never invisible. They are seen, honored, and grieved. And that is not a deficit. It is another way of being human: magical, painful, and very, very real.

To those who do not feel this way, such grief for wasps may seem strange, even childish. But perhaps it can also be read as an invitation: to notice what is usually unseen, to allow the small lives around us to matter. What autistic perception reveals is not madness but another layer of humanity - a way of being that insists life has meaning even in its tiniest forms and smallest details. If the palace of the wasps can be seen as a cathedral, then maybe empathy itself is larger than most people think, stretching far beyond the boundaries most people are taught to draw (which helps explain the empathy problem – neurotypicals often rely on shared social scripts of emotion, which provide cohesion, but from an autistic perspective can feel like displays rather than the raw, deep feelings that remain and do not fade)..