The Gift of the Continuum of Services Part VI: Acceptance of Disability

I like to think of myself as a diamond in the rough. As a kid though, I felt like a lump of coal. People did not generally see me as the Super Blind (Tuttle & Tuttle, 2004) but rather as the fumbling, bumbling Mr. Magoo^®. I was the quintessential Ugly Duckling^®. I was different, defective, deficient… Nobody understood what it meant to be legally blind, and thus, I tended to be viewed as either a sighted oddball or as someone faking blindness. As a result, I learned life was easier if I could make my peers forget that I had a visual impairment, which lead to my obstinate refusal to use any aids recommended by my TSVI/COMS. In fact, my monocular collected dust in a drawer until I started going to concerts with my girlfriends who wanted to borrow it to see the hot singer on the stage. Likewise, my CCTV was kept in a remote location, and I never wanted to leave the company of my workgroup to go study in isolation. While the book player was much smaller and could be used at my desk, I was more interested in listening to my friends rather than trying to decipher synthesized speech. And somehow in my mind, using a magnifier or large print book made me look weirder than holding the regular print book up to my nose.

Having mastered the art of being a wallflower, I was adamantly opposed, much to the chagrin of my dedicated TSVI/COMS, to using any tool that would remind my peers that I was different. Hence, I had become my own worst enemy and the root cause of having to work twice as hard as my sighted peers. Nonetheless, I was not willing to sacrifice the little social capitol I had painstakingly accrued over the years. As such, I did not initially view the white cane as a tool of empowerment, pride, and independence but rather a stigmatizing symbol of shame and inferiority (Goffman, 1986). And of course, I wanted nothing to do with it. Granted, it did not help matters that the cane was first introduced during my teenage years at the time I was actively grieving the realization that I was a non-driver. 

As my friends obtained their driver’s licenses and their independence, I somehow became a cumbersome third wheel as well as a ball and chain. Due to the charitable nature of my relationships, I did not inherently understand that friendship is a two-way street. Perhaps if I had offered my friends gas money, they would have been eager to have me tag along. Regardless, my friends and I began living in two different worlds. As they gained freedom and responsibility, they started to realize that the world was their oyster. I, on the other hand, was terrified of the logistics of being legally blind in a world designed for the sighted. Having no role models with visual impairments, outside of Helen Keller, I had no idea how one could successfully meet life’s demands with limited vision. As I began to face the prospect of leaving the nest and my flock, the façade I carefully crafted over the years began to crumble as I was forced to contend with myself as a VIP (visually impaired person).