Sometimes mad, sometimes more like "Oh good grief, not this again
" or even surprised.
I don't know why surprised, because it happens a lot. But it seems nonsensical to me to be pitied for various things about my life that to me are just facts of life. Other people seem to view them as utter catastrophes and wonder "how I manage" and stuff, and people who think like that rarely even seem to believe that I view these things as part of normal life. (They can even find it offensive that I am not running around feeling sorry for myself, or else decide that I'm unusually strong because of it. No. It really is just ordinary to me. If it's not ordinary to them, it would nearly always become ordinary if they lived this way for any appreciable length of time.)
I get it about the wheelchair a lot. The "I'm so sorry you're in a wheelchair" reaction. I had a conversation with a friend who also uses a chair the other night, about that. Her reaction was basically the same as mine. She wonders why people feel sorry for her for being able to get around, she thinks her life would be much more restricted without one.
But even when I am genuinely in a situation I find highly unpleasant, pity isn't generally a useful reaction. In fact that may be the point at which it's more anger than surprise for me. Because I'll be looking around for solutions, and instead get people pouring useless pity all over me. If they're very dedicated, they'll follow me around doing an "Oh you poor thing" routine. If they knew that it was only self-restraint on my part keeping me from smacking them, they probably wouldn't.
I was also angry the time I realized the only reason someone had pretended to be interested in me, was because she saw me as in need of rescuing. When I did not act like someone who wanted to be rescued, she had turned on me and told me that she'd planned on rescuing me but now wasn't going to do it because I was just an awful person and so forth and that people had warned me I would be like this. Well... I don't want to be rescued, but if you're going to try, at least be honest about it, don't pretend to be educating yourself on a topic you find interesting, or to be trying to get to know me, and then turn around and act like I was looking for sympathy when I answered your direct questions. And if you do, don't get mad if I'm not grateful for your attempts to rescue me from something I don't need to be rescued from.
But... when people pity me instead of doing something useful about truly unpleasant situations, I get mad. When they pity me for things I see as everyday, I just get surprised. It's like being pitied for having a kitchen. But somehow they rarely believe me when I say that.
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"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams