A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I'd like to get some input from people who have experience with other people who have neurological disorders, specifically forms of trisomy. This will need its own thread of backstory, so buckle in.

I have a cousin-in-law in his early 20's. Great guy, is incredibly kind-hearted, loves heavy metal, loves to draw, and is legendary at table hockey. In all seriousness, I don't let him win, he just thoroughly thrashes me with ease in every table hockey game we've played.

The thing is, he has a form of trisomy as well. As a result, his mental age is in the neighborhood of 8-10 as I recall. Even though he's Swedish and I'm American, I've learned enough Swedish that we can sometimes talk in Swedish, and he's even taken it on to learn some English.

Both he and I have some sensory processing issues, namely to noise and chaotic social environments. Him because of what he's got, me because I'm on the autism spectrum. So we both have a tendency to just chill in the living room after holiday meals with my partner's family.

As an aside, even though we can't talk to each other much due to the language barrier, we've still had a great time just listening to heavy metal on Spotify on my laptop, because music transcends language.

With that in mind, I've noticed something which subtly bothers me. While we're chilling in the living room, his name comes up sometimes in the conversations going on in the kitchen. And each time, I've noticed his body language get progressively more "closed". Arms crossed, etc.

Now, again, I'm on the autism spectrum. I'm about the last person who can interpret body language accurately. But I know that while he might have trisomy, he's not fricking *stupid*, he knows that people are talking about him, and I assume that it probably doesn't feel great.

Even *if* he has a mental age of 8-10, I know at that age, I could tell when people were talking about me by my name coming up in the other room, and can confirm that it's a pretty lousy feeling.