it’s disability pride month.
it is hard to tell if an avatar with a disability in second life has disabilities in the real world because secondlife is the sort of place where you can know someone’s philosophies and desires in the most intimate terms and yet have no idea what their players even look like.
why would you want to be blind in secondlife when the whole experience is about seeing? why would you want to have a wheelchair in secondlife when you could walk – hell, you can fly, even? you can be a bird, or a dragon, or a mouse, or a robot.
there are lots of reasons, of course. sian prefers to focus on the positive ones. one particularly powerful one is this: it is easier to imagine being something unreal than it is being something that you see every day. you know the unreal thing isn’t real. the real thing is in front of you every day, parading your difference in front of you and closing doors literal and metaphorical.
and sometimes it is more affirming to simulate overcoming disabilities than to pretend not to have them at all. please understand that disabilities are disabilities because they are made so by society. a blind person is not disabled because they cannot see, they are disabled because allowances aren’t made to accommodate their needs. a wheelchair user is not disabled because they cannot walk (whether it is sometimes or always), they are disabled because they exist in a society that requires the use of steps. conditions that bring chronic fatigue and pain are limiting, but they are disabling because society expects you get everywhere under your own steam and work 40 hours a week and if you can’t, you will be poor, and probably lonely, and you will live in a home you cannot clean, meaning that you will be more susceptible to other health issues. you pay a tax of energy and health that abled people don’t because society isn’t built to support your survival. that’s disability: the removal of agency and freedom from people who are ill, physically or psychologically limited, or, quite often, simply too old.
rl!sian is disabled. now, these disabilities are more or less invisible, although if you know how to spot the signs, it’s not hard to spot. rl!sian is autistic, and has an adhd diagnosis so severe that she is not permitted to drive anymore. her neurodiversities, long before they were diagnosed, lost her a succession of employed jobs through meltdowns, lapses in concentration, states of overwhelm and emotional collapses. she freelances because she is literally – literally literally – the only employer who would hire her. is autism inherently disabling in the way that being unable to walk is? no, but society makes it so. adhd, that’s disabling. but it wouldn’t be if society was built to accommodate it. realising that most people don’t have the struggles sian does simply to make it through any given day is conducive to grief and rage. there are a lot of feelings that sian is still processing. it is exhausting.
sian’s rlv restrictions in second life have developed in such a way as to effectively simulate her autism in the virtual space, and the kinky roleplay, even the darkest parts of it, serve the same purpose: they both highlight her neurodiversity and trauma – there is trauma, of course there is, trauma in spades, entire decades lived in abusive environments, as a child and as an adult – and engage with it. and essentially, sian’s current secondlife experience is a conquest of the structures that make sian’s differences disabling, through gamification. this is what it feels like. finding strategies to defeat it supply something sian simply doesn’t get in real life.
having to adopt patterns of thought and language to navigate chat restrictions, and using the project avatar thing to use sian’s subs’ voices to talk naturally – unnaturally – is magical in a weird, immersive way. it is transformative.
there are caveats and questions, as always. should an abled person affect a disability, especially in a kink environment? are you cosplaying oppression if you do that? do the weird, fantastical mutations of onaholes and biodolls (do a marketplace search later if you want to know), which are impossible and far beyond questions of normal ethicality, even count?
a more complex question is whether a person with one disability might express that in second life through another one, treating that as a metaphor. are you finding solidarity or mocking someone intersectionally, unwittingly upholding systems of oppression? sian will leave those questions open. she doesn’t have the answers. sian just knows that you can pretty much tell who actually has a meatspace disability after a fairly short period of interaction. there’s an understanding of the negative existential space these things create that the abled just don’t have.
sian’s rl disabilities are almost entirely invisible, so her secondlife ones are, too. recently she’s become fascinated with expressing that through holes in her head, and one of those is here. we hope it’s not too disturbing.
featured clothing and accessories:
• :dernier: “erykah” jacket
• ersch gorona panties
• azoury prodigieuse (boots); talalay robot ear
• r2 r2 k/e/n hokuto belt
featured skin and makeup:
• wow skins manon
• shiny stuffs blade shadow; april showers lips
• lelutka evox.mature.001 (skin filter included with evox heads)
• just magnetised countess liner
• sunniva himawari cyberpunk lipstick
