Imagine, if you will, a world where it is considered barbaric to bump into anyone in public. And you’re blind. Oh, and everyone is required to wear sunglasses all the time, so people can’t tell whether anyone is blind, and some people don’t believe blindness exists at all.

It is possible for you to learn alternate methods of sensing your surroundings, but it’s hard. No matter how hard you try, occasionally you’re going to bump into people anyways – maybe you were tired and distracted, maybe someone moved too quickly for you to sense, maybe some jerk tripped you on purpose.

Now, some people respond to this by loudly proclaiming “blind person coming through, watch out, watch out, not my fault if you get in the way,” and then blithely walk where they wish, bumping into lots of people and stepping on their toes. That’s not very nice, and anyways, many people suspect that they’re not blind at all, just jerks who wanted an excuse to hurt people.

Other people are so terrified of bumping into anyone that they curl up into a ball muttering “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t bump into me.” That’s no way to live, but they can’t think of any alternative besides option 1 above.

Eventually, groups of blind people find each other, and set up spaces where there are clear non-visual clues about where to walk, and nobody really minds if you bump into them now and then so long as you don’t seriously injure them. Some people are more careful than others, and there’s debate about how much care ought to be expected and whether it’s okay to punish someone who’s utterly careless, but mostly people get along and the ones that were curled up in corners start to come out of their shells (bumping into a lot of people in the process, but they’ll get better at that in time).

At the same time, however, there’s another group of people… well, sort of, because they have funny voices, and they haven’t quite been considered people in the past, and for a long time it was fine to walk into them, or even beat them up, and nobody cared. But they’ve been fighting that long and hard, and they’ve finally got the anti-bumping laws to apply to them too, even if a large minority still ignores those laws and acts like they’re crazy for being upset when someone bumps into them, or denies it ever happened. They’ve built their own funny-voice-only spaces, but regular people keep trying to break into them, so they have to work hard to defend them while also working hard to defend themselves whenever they’re not there.

Some of the funny-voice people are blind too, and fuck is that ever confusing. Should I expect other people to stop bumping into me now, even though I bump into them still because I’m blind? What if the person is blind? Should they have been more careful, or was this just one of those unavoidable times? And oh god, what if I bump into a funny-voice person, they’ll be so mad at me for not treating them like a person but really I just didn’t notice them, but maybe I should have been more careful, maybe I should just stay far far away from them so that I never accidentally bump into them… Maybe I should retreat to the safer blind-friendly spaces (even though less people will consider me a person there).

But now it turns out those blind-friendly spaces are sitting on top of a gold mine, and regular people keep coming in to mine for gold. And the funny-voice people don’t want to be left out of the gold-mining like they always were when they weren’t considered people, so more of them are coming in too. But the regular people don’t want to share their gold, so they keep bumping into them trying to hurt them, and the blind people are bumping into them too – either because they’re blind, or because they want to hog the gold too, or both – and some blind people are regressing to their pre-friendly-space behaviour, and the funny-voice people are getting injured and really pissed off about everyone bumping into them all the time and some sound ready to just fucking punch everyone…

And here I am, blind with a funny voice, wishing everyone could get along somehow, and wondering if I can ever get any gold myself without bumping into all these goddamned people (or getting injured myself). Some days, curling up into a ball seems like a much easier option all around, but I worry that if I do that, people will say “see, funny-voicers aren’t really people” or “see, blind people can stop bumping into anyone”…

So yeah, I have aspergers, and I’m going to say some stupid shit sometimes and cross boundaries unintentionally. And yeah, I’m female, and I deserve to have my boundaries respected. I’m doing the best I can to minimize the former, and be assertive about the latter without traumatizing other aspies. And once in a while I’ll be a jerk when I know better and could stop myself, but I’m doing my best to minimize that too.

But I still wish everyone could just get along…


et cetera