Yesterday in church, we spent a couple of moments discussing with people near us a moment when we did something that required courage. The people near me all said that they thought I need courage every day just to get out of the house. After all, I could choose not to leave the house.
I chose something different to talk about with them–I have lived with blindness for all of my life, and I have been raised in a way that taught me to choose to live with it and to look for ways to do the things that are normal for everyone else, to expect those things to also be normal for me. This was part of my preparation to participate as part of the community at large. It hurts me to know that people think it requires courage for me to open my front door and leave my house. It hurts because this places a gigantic barrier between us, and I cannot participate as a part of the community. I become an outsider–and a person whose life represents something that the rest of the community–the community that I want to be a part of–fears.
There are occasionally days when leaving the house is hard for me–not because blindness is hard but because the way that society reacts to blindness is hard. Since most people fear blindness, it is hard for me to talk about these days in a way that people might help people to understand why I am experiencing emotional pain. I can never help people to understand my experience of blindness while they are holding on to their fear of it and imagining that this is how I experience it.
At one time when I was very young, someone must have asked me, “How would you feel if…?” I hear this kind of question often. It is the only way that we seem to know to teach young children empathy. By the time children are adults, this is how they have learned to empathize–not by asking questions or observing and drawing conclusions but by injecting themselves and imagining and taking their current perceptions into the new situation, and in many instances they never learn to stop fearing, or stop misunderstanding, or stop hating…
We must do better in learning to observe, in learning to get our own selves out of the way as we come to relate with others. Otherwise, we don’t really know the other person at all. We only know our own selves reflected in their bodies, their stories. And perhaps that is what we should fear most: what we would learn about ourselves in the process of coming to know another person. If I think that a friend requires courage to leave her house in her wheelchair, am I really admiring her? Or am I really revealing my own fear and shame about my own potential unwillingness to face adversity? We have so much potential to heal if we would get ourselves out of the way–both within and together
!
I want to be known in a way that the things I do for the kingdom of God have effect. If people are so distracted by my great courage in leaving my house, what does that say about the things I do once I get out the door? Are they noticed? Or are people blinded by their own attitudes about blindness? I certainly hope not.
- Learning From My Younger Self - February 10, 2024
- more reflections on ITD - June 30, 2023
- On travel while at ITD: reflections after day 1 - June 27, 2023
- ITD day 1 - June 27, 2023
- ITD day 1 - June 27, 2023
- Job Descriptions, Inclusivity, and Equity for People with Disabilities - October 15, 2022
- Traveling without a Guide Dog: Experience with Cane and Walker - October 14, 2022
- Disability and Church, Intersection - June 11, 2022
- Review: When Chronic Pain and Illness Take Everything Away - June 11, 2022
- Grammar and Style Resources for Writers - June 9, 2022
What a well written and thoughtful discourse on the topic. It is rare to read something that is honest without being bitter. I’m often afraid to write about such things because I don’t want to come of as that angry blind lady with a chip on her shoulder. Now I’m just going to take this post and send it to everyone I know and say “see this? Yes, this is how I feel.” You should expand this and send it to the Braille Monitor or Braille Forum. It’d be an excellent article for both.
I think that this is worth noting as well. I don’t feel as though the sighted populous is reacting to attitudes about blindness from a general standpoint. They are thinking about something much more personal. When we are seen on the streets and happen to be out in the wide world, the large number of visually oriented folks are not thinking about what we can do or what we might be capable of showing them. Often, that is not on their radar of perceptiveness. They’re focusing (almost exclusively) on what blindness would mean to them if they would be the ones that would be experiencing it themselves. This makes our struggle that much more difficult simply because I believe it has almost nothing to do with what we show them or don’t show them. It has almost everything to do with the primal fear of this issue within themselves and not much of anything external that we present to them.
I think one thing that the public never seems to understand is pretty much anything we do that gets us out in the public and doing what they do are things we had to be taught just like they were taught, we just use a different skill or technique adapted to use of our other senses and certain high and low-tech gizmos. My impression is that people think, for example, that a blind person decided to go to church or the Starbucks or the ball game or their job just by pulling up their bootstraps, hiking up their courage and spouting a few well-timed aphorisms and just venture forth into the fray with only mysterious magic alien powers to guide us to the right place. The truth is, least for some of us, that we went with a mobility instructor to the place first to learn the route, we were not guided by intestinal fortitude. This is why I believe trying to impress people with capabilities won’t work. They are so convinced that we can only function normally through the power of a good attitude that if one of us created an entire alien ecosystem with nothing but thought energy, rubber bands and a pipe cleaner, they’d look at it and be all impressed but they would also say “well, it’s amazing for that person because that person is amazing, but I’m not amazing. if I were struck blind one day, (and it happens all the time anymore, don’t it) I’d be so clueless and scared that I couldn’t find my way to the kitchen to fetch a cup of coffee and I’d most likely just kill myself trying to get there.”
I have engaged a few people as volunteers for some things like orientation to buildings, help with running errands, etc. In some cases, this has helped those individuals to get to know me. Several years ago, one lady who did some driving for me realized that I didn’t need so much help, and she started telling everyone, “She already has a mom. She doesn’t need another one.” It was kind of cute. I enjoyed getting to know her.