Epiphany

That wasn’t very nice, was it? To drop a teaser about having a great big epiphany and then abandon ship for another week. Very sorry. Spring is a fickle season.

But, the epiphany. Credit goes to Sean, a reader with visual impairments of his own who occasionally leaves me insightful and helpful comments. In an e-mail a couple of weeks ago, he said something that touched me pretty deeply. I’m not sure whether or not he intended it to have this effect, but it caused me to sit up, take a deep breath, and let out a deep sigh of regret, relief, and revelation. It was this:

"I spend a majority of my week impersonating a fully sighted person."

Now, maybe this seems obvious to you, but it was a way of articulating my sadness and frustration and anger and embarrassment and fear and uncertainty and self-doubt that I hadn’t come up with yet on my own. I never pretend I can hear perfectly. I acknowledge my hearing loss pretty regularly even to those I don’t know well (and I’m getting better about mentioning it to relative strangers on the phone, in meetings, and in other random contexts). My hearing aids are obvious enough that observant people notice them. But you would never know that I’m nearly blind unless I told you. Or unless I walked right into you, in which case I’d be deeply mortified and would try to get as far away from you as I could as fast as possible, after apologizing profusely and while fighting back tears.

Because I’m still trying to pass. I want people to treat me like I’m "normal." I want to convince myself that I’m normal, too, and so I attempt to navigate the world as normally as I can, despite the ever-encroaching darkness. As much as I joke about being "the blind chick," I still haven’t accepted myself as blind, nor have I adapted blindness into my identity the way I have hearing impairment.

As I write this, I realize I’ve said nearly exactly this before. So the Sean-sparked epiphany may not seem as profound to you as it felt when I read his words. Still, acknowledging that I’ve been trying to pass as sighted (and, perhaps more important, accepting that I’m totally failing at that effort) helps me understand my resistance to using a cane. Maybe it is a less than earth-shattering revelation, but it’s one I really needed to have.

Comments

[Sean]

Happy to have sparked your epiphany :)
I expected it to have 'some' effect, but I guess I underestimated.
It's just good to know you're not the only 'actor' out there. There are a lot of in-betweeners (for lack of a better term for a the fractionally blind), all in various stages of denial. Being Irish, I'm denser than most, and, as long as people don't see me any differently, I'm not telling them crap about my eyes.
There are totally blind people out there who often pass as sighted. Okay, they're not jet pilots, but so what. Some days I pass, some days I don't. On a computer, I pass.. in a darkened pub.. no chance.
It's tough on the ego, but lately I'm becoming more comfortable as a capable partial blindie than a sightie who can't see sometimes and falls over himself and others.
Yeah, that's what I tell myself (after rationalizing my whacking into something) :P~
You have to look at it like an occasional pain in the ass, as opposed to the 'ever-encroaching darkness'. That creepy Mary Ingalls sh*t will make you mental.