Feeling invisible…I can only imagine how people fade you out of their attention. My few visibly disabled friends have had the same problem. To one friend, it felt like people thought the wheelchair made her stupid or incapable of conversation, but another friend figured it was a more-or-less unconscious avoidance of what she represented to them — pain, sorrow, and their own discomfort with those issues. The idea of discussing the book they were reading or some other perfectly interesting topic seemed frivolous when she had a big TOPIC. And they didn’t want to talk about that, so they ignored her. (She didn’t want to talk about disability all the time either, of course.)

For me, it’s not invisibility in a general way. It’s the lack of recognition of who I really am. To boil it down, I’m queer, kinky, and in an open relationship. I’m also godless, feminist, environmentalist, and against having children for myself or having more than one child for other people. Yep. That’s definitely the boiled-down version.

There are places and communities where I share at least some of those ideas with other people, and that is nice. But I don’t need to agree with other people in order to get along with them, for the most part. When I say I feel invisible, it’s because in Moses Lake and here in Norfolk, people assume that every one of those things I mentioned aren’t true. The assumption is that I’m straight, vanilla, monogamous, religious, etc, etc.

The assumptions of normalcy are constraining, and I negotiate each new relationship with decisions on how much personal information I want to/should share. In my post, I mention that I could “signal” these things more clearly. I could look more like the stereotype of a dyke. I could wear five pounds of pins that communicate my attitudes. I could plaster my car with bumper stickers.

There is the “perceived goodness” of a small community, as you say. Because I’m not biting the heads off chickens or protesting for the rights of potatoes, I must be just like them. My version of goodness is pretty seriously different from many of the versions you’d get in a poll of people in ML.

The way people avoid socializing with you, the way they act as though you were not present, makes it a struggle for you, yourself, to feel present. Is that right? When people don’t engage with you, you fade into a corner in your own mind?

The way people socialize with me, weighing me down with the responsibility of either divulging personal information about how I have sex or allowing them to assume whatever they want…this doesn’t make it hard for me to feel present in the same way you would not feel present. It makes me feel pressured, one-dimensional, fake. It makes me feel like the real me is in danger and needs to be hidden. It puts me into the closet and dares me to bust out.

There’s no way to compare and rank difficulties in life, but there are people who are unable to avoid difficulties and others who more closely fit society’s expectations and can go with the flow. Persecuted and/or misunderstood communities are often (though not always) better at engaging with people beyond the perceived hurdles. For example, I didn’t know very many people with visible disabilities until I became part of a vibrant SM community. The SM communities I’ve been in have been better at dealing with real bodies, their real feeling, needs, desires, abilities, etc. Better at planning wheelchair accessible spaces, yes, but also better at prizing hot sexy people, regardless of what shapes, sizes, or abilities their bodies have. SM communities aren’t there on race, unfortunately. Racism in SM communities works much like you experience ablism in your life - as a greeting without engagement, a discomfort that leads to treating the person as invisible.

Sigh. It’s hard to talk about this stuff without overgeneralizing. As soon as I typed that, I thought of some people of color who are comfortable and enthusiastically welcomed in the community. It’s still a real problem, generally, though. All the people I thought of are very in-your-face, determined people who, I’m sure, fought for the recognition they have.

And I haven’t even touched on the way it must feel for a person to live in intersecting invisibilities. I don’t want to put this on your experience, but I’ve heard and read that people in wheelchairs are treated as non-sexual more often than not. I can only imagine what it would be like to deal with the ways you feel invisible and the ways I feel stifled, all rolled up into one socially disregarded ball of selfhood.