as a disabled person, we are very familiar with the phenomenon of needing to "perform disability" in order to get accommodations- for instance, on particularly bad pain days, using a cane even when isn't actually helping with our chronic pain, in order to signal to people on public transit that if they can, they should move out of a seat for us (which extremely helps with chronic pain). we don't actually do this that much because holding and using a cane often aggravates our wrist injuries, so it can increase our pain even further
meanwhile, we very frequently carry around stuffed animals with us. this serves a few functions:
- increases personal comfort when outside of preferred environments
- decreases anxiety
- good for stimming
- stuffies are cute
and recently we have come to suspect that they have a small additional benefit for us related to the "performing disability" thing: for reasons i maybe have complicated feelings about, i think people are more likely to correctly identify us as being neurodivergent, or at least "weird", and thus (the subset of them who are less oblivious and more compassionate) are going to be slightly less likely to do things that are very annoying to us as an autistic person like trying to get us to make small talk
i don't think the success rate is that great, but also i have very little to compare it to because i haven't looked back from the stuffie life once i started saying heck it and carrying them around with me years ago