ABSTRACT
This chapter offers autoethnographic storytelling as an alternative to the common practices of concealing, underplaying, manipulating, or denying stigmatized differences, practices that allow the “world of normals” to go unchallenged. Expressing feelings vulnerably on the page invites others to express how they feel, comparing their experience to mine and to each other’s. The severity and complexity of the felt experience of stigma has not been developed in social science literature and is more likely to be found in novels, popular literature, and short stories. The alliance with people who share the feelings has lessened the burden of undesired difference. Readers have drawn comparisons from their own lives, telling vivid stories and expressing strong feelings about their interiorized anxiety, shame, and dread.
