“Hey Bartender . . . you assume that I cannot drink a Margarita. So you don’t serve me a Margarita. So I don’t drink a Margarita. Your assumption becomes reality.” One evening in March last year, I opened the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter to find my feed flooded with posts from disabled advocates about a new ad. This in itself wasn’t unusual, but what was unusual was that the response was unanimously positive. I was immediately intrigued. The unfortunate truth is that we as disabled commentators most often find ourselves having to point out—for what seems like the millionth time—what is deeply problematic with the media that claims to represent us (think Sia’s disastrous film Music). It’s rare that we can just lean back and think, “Huh, this is actually good.” In the minute-and-a-half video from Down Syndrome awareness organization CoorDown, actress Madison Tevlin dramatically dismantles misconceptions through the tagline #assumethatican. Starting with a night out in a neon-lit cocktail bar, Tevlin poses various scenarios—from studying Shakespeare to living independently—and challenges the viewer. What if you assumed that I can? A few seconds into watching, I understood the hype. The ad’s message rings powerfully true for disability as a whole, not just Down Syndrome. Personally, at times I mourn for the first twenty-eight years of my life spent under the radar of autism diagnosis, wondering how things might have been different had I known earlier; but I am fearful, too, for what I may never have done, out of assumptions that I couldn’t. Language learning is one of these. After all, my younger brother, diagnosed as a child, was never given the opportunity himself, under the pretext that his “social-communication difficulties” would render it a somewhat fruitless endeavor. I became a translator because I’m autistic, but the irony is, if I’d been diagnosed earlier, I likely would have never become a translator at all.

CoorDown’s brilliant ad is the exception. Finding thoughtful, nuanced representation of disability in literature—or film, television and media at large—is hard. Where disabled characters are included, caricature often dominates depictions, veering dangerously into the realm of “pity porn.” Misrepresentation abounds, and there is an urgent need for more stories told by disabled people, rather than simply about disabled people. Because of this excess of misrepresentation, as a neurodivergent reader and viewer, it is frequently not the characters explicitly named as autistic (who are not only highly caricatured, but almost always male and white), but the “autistic-coded” characters with whom I connect. Commonly held ideas about autism are so misinformed that it is often when writers do not know they are writing about autism that they end up depicting it with the most insight and nuance (it is worth noting that autistic-coding is not always unintentional, but an intentional choice on the part of the author to shirk any form of “labeling”). Such characters provide us a rare glimpse into the authentic, internal experience of autism—or at least something like it—rather than the distorted image seen through the eyes of the neurotypical spectator. Take Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori). Reviews I’d come across prior to reading had primed me to see the protagonist, Keiko, as “quirky,” an “oddball,” not someone I should be relating to. In fact, however, I found myself feeling an uncanny affinity to her experience of a world both incomprehensible and overwhelming, and the solace she finds in the repetition, routine, and structure of her work. I am not alone in this—Naoise Dolan, the autistic author of Exciting Times, writes of reading Murata’s novel in an essay for the Guardian: “I’d thought my brain was too different to appear in a novel, but there I was. I smiled whenever I recognized an experience, which meant I basically smiled for the whole book.” She goes on: “It puzzles me when people complain of not having ‘connected’ with a protagonist [. . .] Characters usually think and act in ways I find alien [. . .] That’s not because I ‘lack empathy.’ Non-autistics would feel as I do about ‘identifying’ if most books were about me and not them.” Perhaps when a neurotypical reads Convenience Store Woman, they are experiencing what an autistic person feels like reading fiction most of the time—and that’s not a bad thing.

This disability issue of Words Without Borders is a collection of stories and essays about us and not them, written by us and not them, translated by us and not them. Across the pieces, at times our disabilities are signposted unambiguously, while at others they are assumed or inherent, though their presence is no less marked. At first, it was for its explicit labeling of disability that I chose to include Lim Sol-A’s “The Brightest World I Knew.” The story is intricate and multilayered, centring around the nightmare that unfolds when the narrator learns that she has been scammed—the newbuild flat she has just bought has been so cheaply constructed as to make it unlivable (similar atrocities, I discovered, have been happening more and more in my home of the UK, too). In the midst of this mess, she happens to find out that her disability may afford her some housing benefits. Having lost two toes in an accident, she speaks of the array of reactions she’s met with whenever she exposes her foot in public—anything from horror, to disgust, to inspired awe. Lim’s story is laced with ironies, and one of these relates to the acknowledgment of her disability: in the eyes of onlookers, her disability is unmistakeable, yet when she tries to gain official recognition by a medical professional, she is casually dismissed and told she is not disabled “enough.” The protagonist of “The Brightest World I Knew” is, in essence, living outside of the bounds of “standard” categories, a theme echoed throughout the story, such as in her excruciating attempts to try and explain to the National Health Insurance Service that she is neither employed nor unemployed: the word “freelancer” simply doesn’t compute.

It quickly became evident, however, that I related to this character on a level much more profound. Again, the feeling of the uncanny returned. Without the explicit “label,” I have not been primed to expect this: I’m holding my breath, eyes wide open as I try to pinpoint exactly what this emotion is. I began to wonder: wait, is she autistic? I read back over the story once more, and it seems so blatantly obvious. Smiling and laughter are central threads throughout the story—as a child, the protagonist looks on quizzically at the people around her, who seem to be forever chuckling when nothing is funny at all, even after they’ve had the chair pulled out from behind them and blood gushes from their head as it hits the floor. “I would stare expressionless at the laughing people. They seemed oblivious to the texture of their own laughter.” When I was young, other kids would ask me all the time, “Why do you never smile?” Why smile when there was nothing to smile about? As children, we can be more dogged in our refusal to bend to such expectations—whether it’s about what we should do, or as the CoorDown ad honed in on, what we can’t do. This was exactly how the protagonist felt: “Growing up, I was always called the ‘tactless child.’ And that was what I was, but I liked my tactlessness.”

But as we move into adolescence and adulthood—especially for women—the pressure to mold an amenable social persona for ourselves mounts. An unconscious change takes place; it is a matter of survival. As Lim’s story progresses, her narrator finds herself smiling and laughing at the strangest of things. At the hospital, when the doctor informs her that she can’t register for a disabled ID card, he laughs heartily, and she laughs alongside. When, though deeply conflicted, she becomes complicit in a shady agreement in order to get the necessary repairs done on her flat, her body goes into autopilot: “My facial muscles began to twitch. My cheekbones lifted and my lips spread out wide. I was smiling, too.” She knows, subconsciously, what I do: that smiles are social currency. They are a symbol of the mask she has, as so many autistic people do, learnt to wear. They symbolize letting go of a part of herself, of the values most important to her. Our masks have a function—society is far less hostile when we wear them—but there is a trade-off. As an adult, I wasn’t asked why I never smiled: at some point, I came to smile automatically. It is only since my autism diagnosis that I have begun to question myself. I, too, smile when there is nothing to smile about. Knowing now that I’m autistic, I have allowed myself to let my mask slip a little, to smile less—if I do smile, I want it to be real, unforced, like Naoise Dolan’s knowing grin as she recognizes glimmers of herself in Murata’s Keiko.

In Kim Heejin’s “By Any Other Name,” from her novel No Matter How Odd, we meet another convenience store woman: protagonist Jeong Haejin has OCD, and as she fixates on her daily routine in the shop, she encounters a colorful cast of characters in the form of her customers, each with their own quirks and neuroses. The excerpt, translated from Korean by Paige Aniyah Morris, shows Haejin hearing a strange voice inviting her to play for the very first time, and she begins to worry that what she’s experiencing might be auditory hallucinations. In an accompanying essay, Morris focuses on names “not as prescription but as affirmation,” grappling with the question of whether disability might ever be represented in a fully satisfying way. Meanwhile, in Adèle Rosenfeld’s punchy sci-fi-esque short story “The Hearing-Aid Brigade,” translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, protagonist Edwin starts a new job, which we gradually realize is located inside a hearing aid. Edwin joins the high-pitch team, where we discover some of the intricate inner workings of Rosenfeld’s hearing-aid brigade. Things take a turn when rumors spread of redundancies in the low-pitch team—a French-style strike is in the making. Elsewhere, when Russia invades neighboring Ukraine, the protagonist of “Abusive Motherland,” Anya, is forced to abandon her treasured St. Petersburg and head for the border; she settles in Norway, where she finds herself relegated to the bottom rungs of society. Written by Yulia Yakovleva and translated from Russian by Lindsay Munford, this is the story of a woman wrestling with the mental health impacts of unspoken family trauma, displacement, and war as she forges a new identity and comes to terms with her “abusive motherland.” Finally, in her essay “Translation and Erasure,” Daniela Tiranti describes working on a rare authentic portrayal of romance between young disabled protagonists and being particularly careful to maintain and clarify essential details, only to discover the editor had subsequently smoothed over or wiped out their disabilities entirely. Her experience reveals the many stages at which erasure takes place.

When I emailed Lim Sol-A about publishing “The Brightest World I Knew” in WWB, I wanted to tell her why I was putting this issue together, and this meant telling my story. Discussing a matter so personal with an author wasn’t something I’d ever imagined I would do, and I was nervous (as I still always am) to talk about my autism, but for some reason I felt safe doing so with her. I explained, too, about the deep connection I felt with her characters, in all of her stories, not only this one. I won’t share her response here, as it is not my place to do so, but I will say that I felt an immeasurable gratitude to have had these conversations with her. In my favorite quote from this story, the protagonist reflects on the literature she loves:

It was in the tenacious search for the truths that people held and their unique perspectives on the world that the many works I had loved and admired shone. That light had already captivated me. It was the brightest world I knew.

The lines encapsulate Lim’s wholly nonjudgmental approach to her characters—both autistic-coded and not—and her longing instead to crawl inside their minds, to try and know how they see the world, and why. Seeing beyond face value, to what lies behind the smile.