The Neighbor
a few days ago, i was at a book club meeting where tumblr’s new policy against adult content and its poor algorithms came up.
a person at the meeting (who is actually one of my neighbors) made a comparison to how pinterest will terminate the accounts of anyone who makes an antivaccine post (she said it like it was unreasonable for pinterest to do this), and i could just feel my sims 3 relationship meter with this person dropping.
i’m open with everyone at book club about being an autistic adult, and I’m really happy that the conversation topic changed. no one really expressed agreement with her, but no one definitely expressed disagreement. I’m glad a big argument didn’t happen at book club, but i trust my neighbor a little less.
i don’t think she believes vaccines cause autism or that it’s bad to vaccinate. it’s her willingness to be sympathetic and her belief that pinterest’s actions are prejudice against natural medicine that make me feel less good.
maybe someday i can talk to her[1] about the ableism that underlies antivaccine movements, and about how the natural medicine movement did me all kinds of harm as an undiagnosed unrealized autistic person, but not yet. I’d need to organize my thoughts and present them in a way where I’m coming across as “i felt hurt” and not “here’s why i think you’re bad and wrong,” or “let me tell you a thing” especially because i don’t know her actual beliefs.
Footnotes
This day never came, because this person eventually revealed her belief that antibiotics, chemotherapy and pharmaceuticals “don’t work,” in a context where I was telling the group about how one of the roughest chemotherapy regimens known to medicine recently saved the life of a young-adult loved one in my life. This neighbor and I no longer live near each other, thankfully. ↩︎