Pandora Parrot @pandora_parrot@beach.city

It's such a strange liminal space. To be marginalized and erased while still getting privilege from the very thing that results in you being erased.

To not be marginalized to the degree that folks with visible minority status face, but still be marginalized. And to be further marginalized BY that lack of marginalization, since it's harder to get support and community around those marginalizations.

Another example are disabilities like my CAPD. I function as hearing 98% of the time, but when I don't, people are very unsupportive. I've literally had partners throw things at me because they were upset I "wasn't listening to them." I've had meetings with people that I could not function in. I don't have support on how to navigate this.

But most of the time, I don't need to. And I can switch situations easily and get back to functioning as hearing quite fast.

An example I'm thinking about is my wife, who mostly passes as white and is treated as white by most people. But being latinx has resulted in her multiple times experiencing racism and discrimination as a result. Currently facing a loan situation that involves her being asked to state that she's a citizen for some reason.

But she's mostly cut off from her hispanic heritage because her mother chose to raise her as "white."

I have a hard time thinking of myself as disabled. I'm autistic. I have diagnosed prosopagnosia and CAPD. I have a disfiguring autoimmune disease.

Because I have a lot of coping mechanisms and have done things to handle these things, I often don't really think of myself as disabled in any way.

But I am, I guess.

It's probably ableism that I struggle with the term. I have this ableist idea that "disabled" means unable to do things. I know that's not what the term means, and yet.

It's minor inconveniences where it affects me, and I did several years of training to try to improve my ability to understand things, and it's been really good, tbh. For example, I can actually hear music now, whereas I never could really when I was younger. Sure, I "heard" it, but it was a massive confusing jumble of sound. It's only in the last few years since I trained my hearing that I could actually distinguish the different distinct elements of music.

I remember going into a meeting in there and it being so bad that I told people to stop inviting me into meetings in there. Yet people did anyways. I remember the last time I went in there, I gave up and just attended the meeting. I could speak just fine, of course, but I couldn't understand most things anyone else said to me. It was so frustrating.

Similar thing can happen to me in bars and arcades and stuff like that. Someone could be talking to me, and I'll just forget they are doing so.

CAPD is... weird. It's like there's this drop-off where certain situations cause my ability to comprehend what's being said to drop to almost nothing.

Sometimes... I think it's no big deal and never bothers me. But occasionally... I go into a room that I can't hear in, and I remember that I have this disability others don't typically have.

There was this one conference room at the office that I simply could not hear in. Something about the echoes would just confuse my brain.