I like the New Year. I know I’ve said so before, but I know resolutions are dumb and I would break mine in about two seconds, so I usually try to set an intention rather than a resolution. Something that is more qualitative than quantitative. Something that invites me to consider my behavior and reactions and try to improve them situation by situation. The idea being that incrementally progress is as valuable as, if not more so, tasks I can check off of a to-do list.
With that long preamble, this is my intention for 2020: I will show up like I have a right to be wherever I am.
I like learning interesting random skills. (Did you know that the saying is actually, “Jack of all trades, master of none; but oftentimes better than master of one.”?) Anyway, when I get the idea in my brain to learn something new, I try to game out what kinds of things I need to think about with regard to my disability. Will being blind affect my ability to do the thing? Or, will the task simply be to convince whoever is teaching my newly coveted skill that I can do the thing, even with my disability? Usually, the latter is the harder task.
In the past, I have gone about making teachers and instructors comfortable with my disability by demurring to their expertise. “I want to do this thing,” I’ll say to them, “but I’m blind. Do you think I can do it?” I depend on their knowledge of the thing to determine whether I’m allowed to try it. Never mind that in most of the new skills I’ve tried, the instructors have no context for blindness. They’ve never tried to teach their thing to a blind person. So often times, even if they’re game to try, they tend to have trepidations and be quick to attribute any struggles I have to my blindness instead of the learning curve of the skill. I often find that instructors do not push me or challenge me. Whatever it is I can manage is “impressive” enough because I’m doing it without sight, which they can’t imagine being able to do.
I’ve had generally ok experiences with most instructors. Unlike my struggles with potential employers, I’m usually paying them for the instruction and they don’t have to make any big commitments to me. Yet, I still feel like I can do better here, going forward. I can ask and insist on being challenged. Instead of saying, “Can I do this, Wise Instructor?”, I can say, “I think I can do this, and here’s some challenges I think I might face and some things we can try to work through them. Yay!”
These are a lot of words to get to the crux of what I want to attempt to do: I want to present my disability as an interesting feature, not a problem. Come to think of it, this could apply to many aspects in my life: my job, my relationships, etc. Over the years, solving the problem of my disability has become more tiresome and annoying. I have concluded that most of the time, my disability and I are not the problem. The structure of our framework is what’s flawed.
I’d like to spend less time being timid when I show up. I see people who walk through the world every day with the knowledge and confidence that they have the right to be where they are: learning and living and failing and succeeding. i’d like to show up like that, too: with the full knowledge that I belong, and have a right to belong, just as much as anyone else.
Happy January, all!