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@YellowIsAHappyColor of course, better to ask now than to get it wrong later!!! ignorance isn’t always malice in my book, you’re good.
if you want to seperate the two, think about a time you’ve been sick.
everyone reacts differently to a virus or a bug or whatever. body and mind are just different from everyone else. if you have the flu, your experience might be different from someone who is 90 years old. all representation is like that, because nothing is truly a universal experience.
no one knows how you truly feel about your illness, so how could they possibly write about it? it’d probably sound like a medical research paper. just symptoms from wikipedia all compiled together.
but you want a character, not an illness.
so you create a character. you add in the fact that they have this illness. you read first hand accounts and a little medical research to make sure you get treatment and symptoms right. boom you are done.
the thing is, a lot of people like other people representing them, if it’s good representation. i do like it when i see a character with anything i identify with, even if the creator isn’t that thing. as long as it isn’t stereotyping.
stereotyping is basically exaggerating traits of something that don’t even apply to everything. you don’t want to make someone who has no empathy an asshole, because that’s simply not always true. it’s also antagonizing and portraying real life people as bad people just because of something they have.
so just be careful, and try to keep the character’s experience similar to firsthand accounts. seriously, they are gold when writing. but also know that character well, so you’d know how they’d react to something like this
