Don't break it for me.

One thing I wish more people attended to with care and thoughtfulness is the question of whether a given situation ought to be optimized for them.

Like, my stereotype of a person with a peanut allergy is … pretty chill? I’ve met multiple people with a peanut allergy who are, like, “yeah, no, obviously Reese’s are great and stuff, yeah, I’ll be proactive about letting you know what I need but for sure if I haven’t said anything please just do your normal thing, I’m tracking it, I appreciate your occasional efforts on my behalf.”

Whereas my stereotype of a certain kind of shrieking Tumblrista—

(by which I mean the kind of Tumblrista who shrieks; I am very much not trying to do a cat coupling and imply that “if Tumblrista, therefore shrieks”; I had to add the word “shrieking” to narrow it down to the right subset)

—wants the entire world to be shaped around their traumas and triggers and idiosyncratic needs.

(Another available stereotype here is “Karen”? But Karen was one of the five nicest girls in my school; I feel weird about that particular slur.)

I get why people can get really pushy about their needs and wants, if they’ve been repeatedly bruised and trampled. And humans aren’t great about escaping the typical mind fallacy—

(by which I mean, “just kind of generally assuming that other humans work the same way you do/that other minds are pretty similar to your own/that what seems obvious and good to you must seem obvious and good to most people, at least if you remind them of it”)

—in the best of times, let alone when the situation is tense and has high stakes.

But I’ve just now come out of two pretty painful experiences in a row, that took place in social circumstances that were not optimized for me, and I don’t think those social circumstances should have been optimized for people like me.

Like, I want to complain about the damage I took and the problems I had, and I even want to complain about, like, stuff that the other people did “““wrong””” according to my perspective, but I don’t actually think they did do anything wrong, it’s more like “boy if they want People Like Duncan to have a non-terrible time next time they should do X, Y, and Z” but like if X, Y, and Z make things worse for 19 participants and better for 1 this is uuuuuuuusually not the right call.

(There are “curb cut” situations where making things better for Duncan is in fact actively good for everyone; my sixth grade classroom was (unknowingly) optimized to soothe my autism and it happened to be optimized in ways that fostered thriving among nearly all my students, most of whom were neurotypical and normal. But you shouldn’t just assume that an intervention on your behalf will have positive effects for everyone else; an intervention that protects someone with glass bones ruins the game of soccer for the rest of the players and the right answer there is “yeah, don’t play soccer, sorry.”)