Category: Disability Rights

Artificial Divide Published

Hello friends. We have reached the end of October and I can’t believe it. I still think it’s August, and the warm weather isn’t helping. I’ve been really busy with work and writing and friends in the last couple months, and I just don’t understand where the fall went. I also just realized the Artificial Divide anthology, which includes my story “Noa and the Dragon,” came out a couple weeks ago and I haven’t shared the news.

Artificial Divide is an anthology of stories by blind authors, about blind characters. It isn’t meant to be about blindness, though of course blindness is a big part of it. It’s about blind people having their own stories, with their own agency, told accurately. It’s incredibly important and I’m glad to be part of it. My story, “Noa and the Dragon,” is set in a secondary fantasy world and is about a young girl who goes blind and how she learns to navigate safely and independently and rediscovers the joy and power of reading. This was the first story I wrote about a blind character, and the hope and vulnerability I put into it makes it really special to me.

You can find the Artificial Divide anthology here on Amazon, or wherever you prefer to buy your books. If you’re a fan of audiobooks, I actually got to narrate my story for the audio version of the anthology, which was a really cool experience. To my blind friends, the book does not appear to be up on Bookshare or Bard yet but I know the publisher and editors are working on that. Please go check out the anthology, and I hope you enjoy reading “Noa and the Dragon” as much as I enjoyed writing it.

P.S. I will put up a more detailed story behind the story page for this one ASAP. And I realize I also owe you a story behind the story post for another story I had published this year. Bear with me. It’s coming. I promise.

How to Write a Blind Character, 2021 Edition

I’m going to the World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention in December, so I’m trying to read all of the books on the Hugo ballot. So about a month ago, I read Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. I did not like it for a number of reasons, but mostly because the way the blind character was portrayed, and really the way the entire premise of the book treats the blind character, was incredibly offensive to me. To be clear, I have seen other blind people on Twitter praising this book to the heavens, so obviously opinions vary, but I disagree with them. A lot. I’m a pretty forgiving reader but this book made me want to scream and throw things. I did in fact put together a very long Twitter thread, because I felt like no one was talking about these issues with the book and they needed to be discussed. If you want to read that, it’s right over here, but that isn’t what I want to talk about in this post. Today, I want to be a bit more constructive and provide some tips on how to write a blind character.

If you’re new to my site or somehow missed it, I’m blind. I was born with Aniridia Glaucoma, which means I don’t have any irises and my eye pressure isn’t normal. I used to have some vision in my right eye, but I had to have it removed almost eight years ago, so now I have no vision in my right eye. I often describe what I see on my right as a big black hole. I do still have some vision in my left eye. I can see light and dark and colors, but I can’t see details unless I’m very close. Often if I see something, I won’t be positive what I’m looking at until I’ve touched it, unless I already know what I’m looking at. I can read print, but generally it has to be really big, and I have to be really close, and even then I’m going letter by letter. Because I don’t have irises, my eyes can’t adjust, so I have a harder time seeing in particularly bright or particularly dark settings.

All of this is relevant, because the first thing you need to know about writing a blind character is that most people who identify as blind do have some vision. Any amount of vision is useful. For example I can read the time on my alarm clock or see the temperature setting on my oven. But how blind people use their vision will vary from person to person and situation to situation. And while any amount of vision is a useful tool we might use, it probably isn’t the first tool we draw on. It’s also important to explain that any amount of vision is vast to a blind person: there is a huge difference between being totally blind and having light perception, just as there is a huge difference between having light perception and having light perception and being able to see colors. So my first piece of advice is to do your research. There is tons of literature out there on blindness, particularly from blind people’s points of view. Read it. And don’t be afraid to seek out blind people and ask questions. If you’re polite and sincere in your goal to do this right, most of us are willing to talk to you.

Do your research not only on how much blind people can see but also on the tools and skills blind people use to be independent. We travel with white canes and guide dogs to get around, and we have years of training to learn to travel safely. Our canes and guide dogs are not props to be abandoned for the sake of the plot or the action sequence (looking at you, Daredevil). They are essential for our independence. Similarly, we use assistive technology, read Braille or large print, put tactile markers on our appliances, have systems for organizing and labeling our food and matching our clothing, and so on. In the past when I’ve had roommates, I’ve had a hard and fast rule that my roommates could absolutely not move my belongings, because otherwise I could never find them again (I have a whole story about searching for my apple slicer for two weeks because someone moved it without telling me). The same goes for moving furniture, especially in familiar environments when I might not be working with my guide dog. I’m describing all these things because so often, when I see blind characters, I don’t see this level of detail on not only how they use skills to adapt to their surroundings but also how they adapt their surroundings to help them.

A big thing I see a lot when people write blind characters is a blind character who has either some kind of magic or superpower or some really advanced technology that effectively negates their blindness. This is bad, because it isn’t true disability representation. Yes, blind people go out and do both ordinary and awesome things on a daily basis in real life, but we don’t do it in spite of our blindness. We do it with our blindness. We have skills and tools and technology that help, but we are still being blind. Our blindness has shaped who we are and how we relate to the world. If you have a blind character with a superpower or advanced technology that negates their blindness, then they aren’t blind.

I’m not saying you can’t write a blind character with cool technology or magic. You definitely can, and I argue you should. If sighted characters get magic, give it to the blind characters too. But you don’t want that magic to negate their disability. One way to do this is to use the details I was discussing above, the blindness skills and tools all blind people use in our daily lives. Another option is to place your blind character in situations where their magic or technology can’t help. Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender is an excellent example of this. You can also impose limitations on the technology or magic, which arguably you should be doing anyway just for good writing, so it’s clear to the reader just how the character is using it. For example, I’m working on a project with a blind character, and she has these wristbands that help her navigate and read print, but they don’t work if she’s going too fast, and she runs into trouble. Alternatively, you can give your character a power that isn’t helpful at all in terms of seeing things. Maybe they have magic that is specifically used in cooking, for example. They can’t use that to navigate the world.

So often, I see blind characters who are just stellar at being blind. Don’t do this. No matter how skilled a blind person is, there are still times when they struggle. Heck, I walk into walls in my own apartment if I’m not paying attention. I also want to note that everyone’s feelings on their vision are different, and they may also vary.

Blind people use words like “see,” “Look,” and “watch.” We enjoy movies and TV shows and sports. At least I’m told blind people enjoy sports. I never personally got that one, but that’s because i don’t like sports, not because I’m blind. Also, a lot of blind people prefer the word ‘blind” to other terms like “visually impaired,” “visually challenged,” or “a person who is blind.” But this will vary person to person. A blind woman once vehemently attempted to convince my younger brother that I should call myself “sightless.” Honestly, that baffles me and I don’t like that as a term, but that’s what she preferred.

Do not have your blind character touch other people’s faces to understand what they look like. First of all, no one does that in real life. It’s super weird and awkward. It also doesn’t actually give the blind person any useful information. They’re not going to think of someone they met as the person whose face felt like XYZ, even if they do the weird face feeling thing. They’re going to remember the sound of their voice.

The big takeaway here is blind people are people too. Your blind characters should also be people, as fully realized as any of your other characters. Their blindness is a crucial part of their identity, but it also isn’t the only part of their identity. Blind people have jobs and hobbies and interests. They date and fall in love and marry and break up. They have pets who aren’t guide dogs. They have kids. They have lives. I would love to see more stories of blind characters that don’t focus on their blindness but are instead about them living their lives and going on adventures and having agency with their blindness.s

A quick note on blocking: if you’re writing from the point of view of a blind character, be very careful, and pay close attention to how you write your descriptions. It’s hard, which isn’t to discourage you from trying it, but as writers we usually write descriptions with sight as the primary sense, and obviously you can’t do that with a character who’s blind. You have to use all your other senses and still make it clear to the reader what’s going on. I learned to write from reading, so I too use a lot of visual descriptions, so I’ve struggled with this too, and I’m blind.

Finally, pay attention to the role you are giving your blind character. As with any kind of representation, make sure they are not filling that role because they are blind. This is particularly important if you plan to write a villain who is blind. Blind people can absolutely do terrible things, but that isn’t because they’re blind. That’s because they’re people, and people can do terrible things. But be extremely careful not to imply that your blind villain is a villain because they are blind or that blindness is inherently evil. I shouldn’t need to say this, but apparently I do (see my Black Sun Twitter thread for details). Similarly, pay close attention to the message you are sending about blindness in your book. Individual people’s feelings may vary, but blindness is not something to be feared, it does not make a person helpless or evil, it does not give a person superhearing or any other enhanced senses, or any of the other stereotypes and misconceptions that are rampant in popular media.

I do not want to discourage anyone from writing a blind character. I do not subscribe to the belief that writers should only write within their experiences, because I believe writing outside our experiences is how we learn. But that is only true if you’re willing to put in the work to do it well and not cause harm with your story, which you can do so easily if you aren’t careful, even if you have the best intentions. Please, write blind characters. We need more stories about blind people. But please, please, please do your research. Hire sensitivity readers who are blind to review your project, pay them for their time, and listen to their advice. And please pay attention to what you are ultimately saying about blindness in your work. Remember that both writing and reading are ultimately acts of empathy, and how you portray blind people on the page will impact how people see blind people out in the real world. That’s a lot of power to have, so use it for good.

So How Much Can You See?

This is a question I get a lot. Like a lot a lot. It’s right up there with how do you accomplish anything and tell me all about your dog.

Personally I don’t mind answering this question, though I admit that I don’t really understand either the question or my answer.

Let’s dig into this a bit.

First, I don’t mind answering this question because it helps people understand what I might need in any given situation. If I say that I have trouble seeing in dim surroundings, then yes, I could use a little more help in the D.C. metro. This isn’t to say that I can’t navigate the D.C. metro for myself just fine, but on the off-chance that I’m with a friend or a coworker and I would rather rely on their assistance at that moment, I want them to be able to help me as much as they can—and not too much.

So how much can I see? I’ve answered this question so many times that I pretty much just real it off. I can see light and shadows and color in my left eye. I can’t recognize faces, but I can read print if it’s 72 point font and my nose is pressed to the page or computer monitor (it’s not a good way to read, of course, but it gives someone who can see a solid way to understand what I can see). I don’t have any vision in my right eye, though I used to. Since I used to have vision in my right eye, I can describe what it’s like to be totally blind as well. For me, it isn’t so much black as nothing. Sometimes I still see flashes of color or spots of light, because phantom eye is a real thing and my brain is constantly trying to fill in. I like to describe what I see in my right eye as a hole in my vision. It means that when I’m watching TV or going to the movies, I like to sit on the far right, so the hole doesn’t get in the way. When I’m drawing, I use my left hand now, because otherwise the hole and my nose get in the way. I always finish my description about my vision by reiterating that I identify as blind because I read Braille and travel with a guide dog.

You might think this is a lot of detail to go into. Sometimes I don’t go into this much detail. I often don’t describe what it’s like to be totally blind unless someone asks me. But I will say that I can see light, colors, and shadows, that I could read print if it’s 72 point font and my nose is pressed against the screen, that I have more trouble in either bright or very dim areas, and that I travel with a Seeing Eye dog and read Braille.

I go into this much detail for a few reasons. Blindness is a difficult concept for someone who can see to even comprehend. It’s more than walking around with your eyes closed or even walking around blindfolded. You can open your eyes or take off the blindfold. If you’re blind, really blind, you have to adapt your whole life. It’s definitely doable, but to someone who can see, it’s unfathomable—doubly so because how blind people accomplish daily tasks is often a mystery to the sighted world. This means that there’s a lot of fear surrounding blindness.

Sidenote: This is why stunts where people put on blindfolds to simulate blindness are both insulting and damaging. For more on that, see this post I wrote a few years ago on the #HowEyeSeeIt campaign.

Another sidenote: part of the reason I’m doing this series of blog posts is to demystify how blind people do things.

The other reason I give so much detail is that people often automatically assume that I’m totally blind, and this can lead to them trying to give me a lot of help I don’t need. This isn’t a terrible problem. I make sure to communicate what I do and don’t need in any given situation. But sometimes I can head that conversation off at the pass with a description of what I can and can’t see. Sometimes it’s a way to start the conversation about what kind of help I need or the fact that I don’t need help at all.

It’s obvious when you think about it, but blindness isn’t an on-off switch. Some people are totally blind, but I know people who are visually impaired with drivers’ licenses. There are people who only have light perception, and people who only have trouble seeing at night. Some people can see color. Some people have vision that is slowly deteriorating. I’ve been in groups of blind people where I have the least amount of vision, but I’ve also been part of groups where I have the most. I have enough vision that among my blind friends, I can be the one guiding people around. But compared to a sighted person, I have barely any vision at all.

When someone asks how much I can see, I don’t mind answering. It’s a good conversation starter, and I think I’ve gotten my answer down to something that someone who can see can at least grasp. But I wonder how much my answer makes sense to someone who can see.

To me, the idea of 20/20 vision is incomprehensible. Recently, a friend who is totally blind said that she didn’t really enjoy long descriptions of the setting in books because she can’t picture them. I admit that my first reaction was to judge her for her lack of imagination, but then I realized I also imagine what I’m reading based on my vision. I have a vague idea of what people can see, based on descriptions in books, but when I envision what I’m reading or what I’m writing, I always see things the way I see things in real life. I don’t magically have perfect vision in my dreams or in my mind’s eye. When I’m writing, I often have to ask friends whether it’s possible that a character would see something at a certain distance or in a certain context. Sometimes there are details that I’ve been told in critiques that a character would totally be able to see, like that time the premise of my whole novel fell apart because I didn’t understand that one character would recognize another character by sight.

When I was in fifth grade, I got prescription glasses for the first time. I put them on, and suddenly I could see that the green out the window was a tree, and that the tree wasn’t just green, but light green and darker green where the leaves cast shadows. Until I put on those glasses, I didn’t have those details in my mind. I understand vision a little bit, because I have a little bit, and while I can conceptually understand what it’s like to have more, I also know that I just fundamentally don’t get it.

When I have this conversation with a sighted person, it almost always feels scripted. They ask, “So how much can you see?” I respond. And they say, “Oh wow.” Or maybe they have one or two follow-up questions (at least these conversations have gotten away from the “How many fingers am I holding up?” response). But I wonder if sighted people have trouble understanding what I can see just as much as I have trouble understanding what they can see. Can they conceptually understand what I’m saying about how much I can see, but fundamentally just don’t get it? Someone who’s sighted definitely knows the pieces of what I’m talking about—light, shadows, colors, font size, contrast—but does that really mean anything to them? What are we talking about, really?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. Honestly it’s making my head spin a little bit. But I hope that by talking about it, we can undo some of the stigma and fear surrounding blindness, and maybe we can all become more empathetic in the process. That’s why I answer this question. That’s why I answer almost any question, really.

This got a lot deeper than I originally intended, but now I’m curious. Do you think it’s possible to really, truly understand what it’s like to have a certain amount of vision, whether that’s totally blind, totally sighted, or somewhere in between? To my blind friends, how do you go about describing how much you can see to others? Are you comfortable sharing that information with others? Do you find it’s helpful? To my sighted friends, is it helpful when I describe what I can see or is it just confusing? Let’s turn this into a real conversation.

It’s Meet the Blind Month: Let’s Talk About That

October is National Disability Awareness month, or as the National Federation of the Blind calls it, Meet the Blind Month. Meet the Blind month always gets under my skin as a name, and today I want to talk about why. I’m also going to talk more generally about how you should talk about blindness with blind people.

As I said last week, these are my views. I do not purport to represent all blind people. I’m sure there are many who disagree with me. And I certainly don’t represent all people with disabilities. Further apologies if this post is a bit scattered. I’ve been pretty sick all day and I’m not at my best organizationally-speaking, but I wanted to get this out there.

So, Meet the Blind Month. I understand the point. I do. A lot of my friends will put up posts or statuses answering some common questions they get about their blindness and inviting their friends and followers to ask more. In case I haven’t been clear, I’m all for that. But I find the name Meet the Blind Month to be frankly demeaning, doubly so because  it comes from an organization meant to empower the blind through increased independence. I am not some rare specimen in a petting zoo to be put on display in October. (Oh look, a blind Jameyanne. Look how it picks out matching clothes. How fascinating.) More importantly, I dislike the implication that the public doesn’t have to interact with the blind any other month of the year. We don’t just come out of the woodwork in October.

Honestly, though, I don’t really like National Blindness Awareness Month or National Disability Awareness Month, or any of the other myriad names we have for the same thing. I understand that, as much as I would like our society to be at a point beyond awareness, we aren’t. Most people have never met or interacted with a blind person, and blindness can make people uncomfortable or frightened. So yes, we want to build awareness about blindness and what blind people can do independently, but I wonder if we should go beyond that. Why not seek to build awareness by seeking more than awareness? Why not call it Blindness Rocks Month? Or something less terrible but you get the point. Let’s not just be aware of blindness. Let’s celebrate the accomplishments of the many incredible blind people out there who have done great things, not despite their blindness but with their blindness and because of their blindness.

Terms like “awareness” sound a lot like other ways sighted people try to avoid the issue–perhaps part of the NFB’s purpose behind rebranding the name (Meet the Blind Month is still terrible). So I want to talk about how to talk with a blind person. This has been coming up in my life a lot lately with my transition to a new job and all the new people I’ve been interacting with.

I identify as blind. Not visually impaired or visually challenged, not low vision, and certainly not sightless. This is an intensely personal choice. I can see light and color with my left eye. I can even read print—if it’s 72 point font and my nose is pressed to the screen or the page—but my vision is not my primary tool for navigating the world. I read Braille. I travel with a Seeing Eye dog, I primarily use smell and taste to judge if a meal is finished cooking. I know when to cross streets based on auditory cues. So I’ve found that blind more accurately describes how I use my vision and what I might need in any given situation. The other descriptors sound like I am missing something, and that is the exact opposite impression that I want to give. This post on using the word “disabled as” opposed to “special needs” does a really good job of explaining why some disabled people prefer to identify as disabled or as their specific disability. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it. Terms like “differently abled” or “special needs” might seem like they’re more politically correct, more humanizing, or more accepting than other options, but they in fact highlight differences and make it harder to fight for disability rights, which are at their core equal rights.

Another note, I used to be big into person first language—“a person who is blind” or “a person with a disability”—but lately I’ve found that to be clunky and awkward, and I don’t mind referring to myself as a blind person. I don’t feel as strongly about this and my choice is more about how grammatically awkward person-first language feels to me.

Another big thing for me is I hate it when people try to skate around visual words in a conversation with me. I speak the same language as you, and you don’t need to alter what you were going to say because I can’t see. Expressions like “see you tomorrow” are not going to offend me. You can totally ask if I saw a movie or if I watch a TV show. In fact, trying to avoid visual words just makes it awkward for everyone.

Again, my choice of how I identify and what language I like to use is entirely mine and entirely personal. Other people identify differently. Other people find some language ableist that I don’t mind. I have a friend, for example, who finds the use of “blind” to mean “ignorant” in research studies to be ableist. I don’t have a lot of experience reading research papers like she does, but in regular conversation I don’t mind it. I also tend to make blind jokes and make fun of myself all the time, though I know other blind people who would never joke about it.

If you’re curious, I recommend checking out this list of ableist language. It’s pretty comprehensive. As the author says, not everyone is going to be offended by all of these, and some will claim the terms for themselves as their identity, the way I claim blind as my identity. But it’s worth being aware of the roots and meanings of some of these terms and phrases. Even I was surprised by some.

I can see how this can be complicated terrain to traverse as a sighted person, but sighted people have their own preferences for identity and language too. Just like sighted people, all blind people are individuals. Don’t assume that just because I prefer to go by blind, the next person you meet prefers blind too. If you’re interacting with a blind person, take your cues on how they identify or what language they prefer from them. I always try to be clear about my preferences when it comes up, but if someone isn’t being clear, don’t hesitate to ask. It might be awkward, but it’s respectful.

And speaking of questions, if you have any about this or anything else, let me know. I’m happy to clarify anything I’ve said here, and there are many more blind posts to come.

Two Conversations

Since I finished the bar, I finally caught up on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It’s an excellent show, if you haven’t seen it, and it’s very funny. What I particularly like about it is that it has the effect that some of my favorite books have on me. Sometimes, when books have a particularly strong and distinctive narrative voice, I walk around after putting them down thinking in that narrative voice. This happens to me with Mrs. Maisel too, which basically means that I walk around thinking, and sometimes talking, like her, and ultimately leaves me with the impression that I could be funny too. Sometimes, I catch myself inventing standup routines.

Don’t get me wrong. I would never, never, never ever do standup. Never ever. Never.

But then I realized that the standup routine I’ve been honing in my head for a few weeks perfectly ties in with my desire to start a series of posts about how blind people do things, so I decided to share it with you. In written form, because as I said, never.

There are a lot of things you take for granted which are a challenge when you’re blind. Take traveling by airplane. Once you get to the airport, you have to find the ticket counter. I usually do this by asking the first person I pass for directions, and then when their directions inevitably prove insufficient, I ask someone else, and someone else, until I eventually find my way to the line. Then I can either ask for assistance getting to the gate, which is faster but comes with its own indignities, or I can find my way by myself, basically by asking one person after another until I get there again. The check-in counter people never like it when I try to walk off by myself (last time I tried this one woman actually started yelling at me), but I usually ask for assistance, because despite feeling like I’m being manhandled all the way, it’s faster, I know I’m getting where I’m going, and I avoid the desperate sense of fumbling panic I get whenever I try to do it myself. Also, you’d be surprised how many people have no idea where they are.

But don’t worry, I’ll get to practice my independent airport travel, because my escort will get me to the gate, find me a chair somewhere, and leave me there. And either I’ll have to use the bathroom, or the gate will change and before I can ask for help the gate agent has run off to the new gate.

When I’m finally on the plane, there’s the obligatory argument with the flight attendant about how it’s safer for my dog to sit under the seat in front of me and no I do not want to sit in the bulkhead and no it is absolutely not the law I sit in the bulkhead. And then someone sits next to me.

On the best of days, I’m one of those extroverted introverts who would rather walk to my destination than talk to the random stranger sitting next to me on an airplane. But if I’ve gotten this far, it’s not the best of days. I really do not want to talk to whoever sits next to me. But they want to talk to me. They always want to talk to me. Because I am fascinating.

I’m not fascinating because I lived in Italy for a year or because I went to Harvard Law. I’m not fascinating because I’m a space lawyer at the FCC or because I’m working on a novel.

I’m fascinating because I’m blind.

And if any of the rest of that stuff comes up, it’s always with the question “But how did you do that?”

Before they even say a word, I know my new airplane buddy and I will have one of two conversations:

“I saw you get up from your seat at the gate and walk to the jetway all by yourself. How did you do that? Actually, how do you do anything? How do you exist?”

Or: “Oh my gosh I have a dog too!”

You know what? This isn’t funny at all.

I brought a book to read or work to do on this flight. Or maybe I was hoping for a chance to nap. But my new airplane buddy has questions, and they think they’re entitled to ask them, however personal they may be.

But here’s the thing. I always answer.

Last spring, this #AbledsAreWeird hashtag was going around Twitter. It made me really uncomfortable, and I wrote this long post about how I felt it was counterproductive to yell at able-bodied people who reacted to disability strangely or tried to help in unhelpful ways. I talked about how, if we want the ableds of the world to accept us, we can’t call them weird. We have to be willing to start productive conversations with them.

So no matter how gross I feel on that airplane, and no matter how much I just want to plug in my headphones and ignore the person sitting next to me, I answer their questions.

But I’ve still spent a lot of time these last few months thinking about my #AbledsAreNotWeird post and wanting to do more with that. I feel like I spend a lot of time and energy actively avoiding the topic of my blindness. Yes, I answer people’s questions. Yes, I talk about it on this blog occasionally. But I’m one hundred percent avoiding the book discussion at my work for National Disability Employment Awareness Month because I just don’t want to be the blind girl in the room objecting to the representation of disabled characters in the book. I didn’t even read the book because I knew from the description it would make me angry. But I do want to do more, because blindness is part of who I am. I live with these same two conversations every day, and I want to do my part to change that.

So I’m starting a series of blog posts on how I do things as a blind person. I won’t pretend to speak for all blind people, and I certainly can’t speak for all people with disabilities. But every Monday, I’m going to talk about how I do something. I have a ton of ideas, but if you have specific topics you’d like me to talk about, please let me know.

It’s ambitious, but I want to use these posts to start new conversations.

When someone sits next to me on an airplane and asks how I got from my chair to the jetway, or how I use a computer, or how much I can see, I answer their questions. Because like it or not, I’m probably representing all blind people with my reaction. It shouldn’t be this way, but it probably is. And I answer their questions because I hope the next time they sit with a blind person on an airplane, they’ll ask if they watched the Red Sox game last night instead.

Ableds Are Not Weird

In the last few weeks, this #AbledsAreWeird hashtag has been going around on Twitter. The hashtag was started by Imani Barbarin to express frustration at all the indignities people with disabilities have to deal with on a regular basis, and it’s gotten so big that it’s made the news. I’m probably inviting some kind of Twitter war with this post, but as you can guess from my title, I disagree.

Let me be totally clear. The experiences people are talking about on this hashtag are at best upsetting to the people who have to experience them, and many of them are worse than horrifying. I have experienced a lot of these things myself. I have been prayed over on the subway because I’m blind. I have been physically prevented from entering buildings or going upstairs. Strangers have grabbed me, my cane, or my guide dog and attempted to pull me where they think I want to go. People have taken my things and asked me personal questions, and I’ve probably been discriminated against while job hunting. And I’m talking about people in the U.S. here. So when I say I disagree with what’s happening on the #AbledsAreWeird hashtag, I’m not saying that because I’m unsympathetic. What people are talking about on this hashtag really happens. It happens on a daily basis, and it’s awful, and it hurts, and we should talk about it.

But I don’t think this is the way to talk about it.

My problem with the hashtag is pretty simple. As far as I’ve seen, and admittedly there’s a lot to scroll through so I may be missing something, the hashtag has turned into a space where people with disabilities are shouting about things people without disabilities have done to them, and then calling people without disabilities weird. Barbarin says she hopes the hashtag will make able-bodied people feel accountable for their actions, but I honestly don’t understand how. This does nothing to solve the problem. It doesn’t even really tell able-bodied people what the problem is. It just accuses them of something that they probably think of as being helpful or honest curiosity. And by accusing them in this form, I feel like it’s just pushing them away.

Ableds aren’t weird. They just don’t know that what they’re doing is insensitive or offensive. Instead of pushing them away with accusations without explanations, we should be reaching out to them with positive messages of what they can do to be helpful and what kind of questions it is appropriate to ask.

But, Jameyanne, why should it be on us to educate people about what we need all the time?

I get it. It’s frustrating to constantly have to educate the public. I’m pretty patient about it, but I definitely have days when someone tells me I can’t bring my dog into their restaurant, and I feel like exploding. But exploding doesn’t help.

When I feel like exploding, I think of a story my younger brother told me. He was with some friends when he saw a woman who was blind walking back and forth along the block across the street, obviously trying to find a specific doorway. He crossed the street, approached the woman, and offered assistance. He grew up with me, so he knows how to do this appropriately. He didn’t grab her. He just asked if he could help her find what she was looking for and offered to give her directions or sighted guide to her destination. (Sighted guide is when a blind person holds a sighted companion’s elbow and walks a half-step behind them, using their movements as a guide rather than a cane or guide dog.) My brother was polite, he used the right terminology, and the woman still exploded at him. And he came away feeling like he would never offer to help another blind person, because he didn’t want to have his head torn off for it. And I’ve heard similar stories from all sorts of other people.

So when I feel like exploding, I think of the damage I would do by exploding, and I don’t. At least not at that person. I maybe explode when I get home and I’m in private or talking to close friends.

The #AbledsAreWeird hashtag is kind of like everybody exploding at once. At best, it’s confusing for the ableds of the world. Saying “random person grabbed me and tried to drag me across the street today” doesn’t mean anything to someone who thinks that’s a helpful response to seeing a blind person on the corner. They don’t know that what they did is the opposite of helpful. They don’t even really think about what they’re doing, because if they thought about it, they’d probably realize that it is never appropriate to grab another human being and drag them across the street. So complaining about what happened on twitter doesn’t solve the problem. If anything, it makes it worse because it pushes the ableds away. And we don’t want to do that. For one thing, think how it would be to find yourself in a situation where, for whatever reason, you really need help, and you can’t find it because people are unwilling to help for fear of doing something wrong. For another, it just makes people with disabilities seem more other to able-bodied people.

It’s probably true that the hashtag has allowed people with disabilities to feel less alone over these experiences. This is certainly a valuable thing, but there are countless facebook groups, email lists, etc for disabled people to get together and gripe about an inaccessible and insensitive world. But Twitter is a public place. The people being griped at can see the griping. In my opinion, if you’re going to have a public conversation about this problem, it shouldn’t start with calling the people on one side of the argument weird. Granted, with only 280 characters to make your point, Twitter isn’t always the best forum for a productive conversation, but words matter, and personally, I think #AbledsAreWeird was a poor choice to label this hashtag.

When someone without a disability does or says something that I find inappropriate or offensive, I stop them and I educate them. When a random stranger on the street corner says “It’s time to cross,” grabs my arm (or my dog’s harness), and attempts to drag me forward, I pull free, step back, and say, “Please don’t grab me or any other blind person without permission. I appreciate that you’re trying to be helpful, but it pulls me off balance, distracts me and my dog, and endangers my safety. Also, I don’t want to go that way.”

Is this easy? No.

Can it be frustrating? Yes.

But is it necessary? Absolutely.

We have to educate people. No one else will do it for us, because they can’t. They don’t know what we need as individuals, stereotypes abound, and unfortunately most people have never interacted with someone with a disability (check out this horrifying study from Perkins School for the Blind if you don’t believe me). We, people with disabilities, know best what we need. We need to be the ones to tell people what we need and don’t need, and we need to do it in a positive way, or we will get nowhere.

Yes, it’s high time that we started publicly talking about the many microaggressions and macroaggressions we face every day as people with disabilities. But there needs to be a next step. If we’re going to say “this is not okay,” we need to say what is okay. In my opinion, this needs to be a conversation, not a one-sided shouting match.

So to start that conversation, here is your periodic reminder that you can ask me questions about what it’s like to be blind and how I do things when I can’t see. I will happily answer. I will answer based on my own experiences, so bear in mind that I am not every blind person, but I will answer. The only reason I won’t is if it’s a totally inappropriate and personal question, in which case I will tell you so. But I will not laugh at you. I will not shout at you. I will not call you weird.

So fire away.

What Disability Rights Mean to Me

I’ve talked to a lot of people about this already, but for those who don’t know, I’ve decided to pursue a career in space law after law school. When I tell people this, I get two different reactions.

 

Either: That sounds so cool! … What is it?

 

Or: What happened to disability rights? You’d be so good at that.

 

Let’s set aside the first reaction for now. I’ll come back to what space law is in a future post—I promise. Today, I want to talk about that second reaction. What happened to disability rights? And the follow-up comments that I’d be so good at that and it’s really important.

 

In true Jameyanne’s blog fashion, let’s back up. Believe it or not, I started thinking about law school about three-and-a-half years ago. I’d been in Italy for about a month, and I was already pretty sure that I didn’t want to be a teacher. I was invited to a dinner at the local chapter of the Lions Club, because this chapter was involved in fundraising for a guide dog school in Milan, and they’d heard about the blind girl walking around Assisi with her guide dog and wanted to see her in real life. So I went to this dinner, and when I successfully  cut up my own chicken, everyone at the table applauded. I kid you not. They applauded.

 

I got back to my apartment at about two in the morning, exhausted and frustrated to the point of tears. It had been a long, difficult month, filled with countless incidents just like this. The people who screamed at me on the bus for having the nerve to leave my apartment by myself. The clerks who tried to stop me entering their stores. The head of the school for the blind who wouldn’t let me volunteer to help teach the students skills for independent daily living—like pouring liquid or getting toothpaste on the toothbrush without making a mess—because, and I quote, “they can’t do that.”

 

So here I am, at two in the morning, tired, homesick, definitely in culture shock, confused because I’m six months out of college and I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, and furious because I just want to cut up my chicken without people clapping. And I think to myself, you know, self, you could make a difference here, if you really want to. You could go to law school and become a disability rights lawyer and make a difference here, or back in America, or anywhere. You might wonder why law school was the first thing I came up with for a way to make a difference, but actually I’d been told by my parents and our family friend/my special education advocate, Eleanor, that I would make a great lawyer. And I’d actually been fighting against this idea for years. But here I was, seriously contemplating it.

 

Granted, I was seriously contemplating it at what was now 2:30 AM, so I took that contemplation with a large pinch of salt. But I couldn’t shake the idea, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. So I spent the next year volunteering at the New Hampshire Disability Rights Center, which I loved, while I studied for the LSAT, took the LSAT, applied to law schools, got accepted to law schools, and decided where I wanted to go. And then I started law school.

 

Law school,  if you don’t know this already, is literally the worst. I have never worked so hard and felt so stupid. I’ve heard this from a lot of friends in grad school for other fields, so it may not be exclusively a law school thing. It took me less than two weeks to start questioning all my life choices and berating myself for letting my crazy 2:30 AM ideas get me into this mess. But I stuck with it, because everyone said there was a steep learning curve, and I’d only been doing this for two weeks. This was nothing like what I’d been doing at the DRC, but of course I had no legal training when I was there. What if the lawyers were spending all their time doing what I was doing in law school now? Could I do this for the rest of my life? So at some point, I asked my resident advisor if this was what it was like to be a lawyer. He said no, not really. Being a real lawyer was more like what we were doing in my legal research and writing course—applying cases and statutes to new problems—than what we were doing in my black letter law classes—reading a lot and analyzing a zillion cases that all said a zillion different things. This advice helped a lot, because I was enjoying my legal research and writing class better than anything else so far.

 

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t doing the right thing here. I just wasn’t totally happy with the idea of doing disability rights anymore. There were a lot of reasons for this.

 

First, I knew I didn’t want to litigate or work with individual clients. I was more interested in broader policy issues. I wanted to go into the federal government and make a bigger difference. But then the 2016 election happened. I don’t want to get political, but civil rights and the federal government became much less certain after that. Our teachers advised us not to give up on federal government work if that interested us, because the federal government was going to need good lawyers now more than ever. But the idea that, if you worked for the federal government, what you were defending or choosing not to defend, what policy you had to promote, could change so radically overnight, shook me. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t obvious to me until I saw it happen. And I didn’t know what to do with it. If I didn’t want to work defending individual clients, and if I didn’t want to litigate, and if I wasn’t sure about working at the federal government, where did that leave me?

 

I spent most of second semester feeling like I had no clue what I was doing. I toyed with the idea of going into literary law and being some kind of literary agent/lawyer thing. And while that seemed like it would nicely tie everything I’d done up to this point together, I just couldn’t get really excited about it. When I got my internship at the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights in Boston, I thought education law might be what I’m interested in. I was interested in education—why I’d decided to teach in Italy rather than research—and I’m passionate about all children getting an equal education. See any of my rants about Braille literacy and you’ll get the point. And the way the attorney who interviewed me described the Department of Ed, it seemed like a really good fit with my interests. But within the first few weeks at that internship, I knew that this, too wasn’t right. I wasn’t sure if education law was right for me or not—unfortunately I wasn’t doing much legal work because the office was so unclear about what it was supposed to be doing after the election—but I knew that in general this kind of federal enforcement office wasn’t for me. Basically, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Ed makes sure that any school receiving federal funds is following the federal antidiscrimination laws. So, if there’s alleged discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or disability, OCR does a review to make sure the school is complying with the federal laws. But, to give one example they used during orientation, if you have a really small rural school that’s receiving very little federal money, the school can just decide they don’t want the federal money and then they don’t have to comply with the federal laws. When I asked, “But where does that leave the student?” the attorney basically replied that, as sucky as it is, the Office for Civil Rights doesn’t have power to do anything about it if the school isn’t taking federal funds. And this really bothered me. I know I know, I’m a walking contradiction. I don’t want to litigate for individual clients, but when I’m working for the agency that’s making sure the law is upheld in a broader context, I’m upset by the idea that a hypothetical student could be discriminated against and there’s nothing we could do about it. And again, this left me… Where?

 

So that’s my first reason for being uncertain about doing disability rights. I just wasn’t  sure I wanted to do it. I wasn’t sure I’d be happy doing it.

 

My second reason is tied pretty closely to my first reason, and that’s that it just seemed like it would be exhausting, particularly in today’s political climate. It felt like everywhere I turned, I was hearing about activist burnout. And let’s be honest, I face disability discrimination pretty often myself, almost on a daily basis, even here in America. If someone on the subway isn’t insisting he’ll pray for god to fix me, someone else is shouting “Oh my god, she’s blind!” If I’m not being stopped from entering a restaurant and asked to prove that Neutron is a service dog—illegal, by the way—then someone is seizing my arm and attempting to drag me and Neutron across a street when I didn’t want to go that way thanks very much. I’ve had cashiers in the law school cafeteria question whether Neutron is a service dog, for crying out loud. I’ve had people refuse to let me get on elevators with them because they’re afraid of my dog. And then there are all those pesky new airline policies about service dogs (there’s another post about emotional support dogs coming, let me tell you). And this might be a standard week for me. I try to be polite about it all, but I’m only human, and it’s frustrating. I swear the next time someone asks if Neutron is a guide dog is going to get the response, “Yes, I’m blind. I can take out my fake eye to prove it if you insist.” The idea of working forty hours a week on this sort of thing, and then having to live it myself is pretty unappealing. Reason number three really didn’t help with this either.

 

Reason number three is that from the moment I started law school, anyone who met me, whether at the law school or not, assumed I was going to do disability rights. Conversations invariably went like this: “Oh, you’re going to law school? And you’re blind? So you’re going to do disability rights, right?” And this drove me nuts. Just so you know, I absolutely hate it when people assume things about me just because I’m blind. For example, in sixth grade a friend told me I couldn’t learn to make those gimp lanyard things everyone was making because it was more of a “sighted person thing.” I would stop at nothing to learn how to do it. That’s the kind of person I am. When someone assumes I can’t do something or I will do something or anything like that, I immediately want to prove them wrong and I do the opposite. So yes, I went to law school wanting to do disability rights. But between discovering that I wasn’t really sure about that (reasons one and two), and the constant assumptions that I’m blind so of course that’s what I’m going to do, I was really unhappy with the idea of doing disability rights.

 

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it myself for a while. I shouldn’t make decisions because of what some people say. I shouldn’t let people’s assumptions derail my career. But like I said, I had plenty of other reasons why I didn’t want to do it. Above all, I didn’t think I would be happy doing disability rights, which is ultimately what made my decision. Yes, part of the reason I wouldn’t be happy is that I couldn’t stand the way people were always trying to pigeonhole me into disability rights because I was blind. But the problem remains, I wouldn’t be happy.

 

If you’re still not convinced, let me relate some of the conversations I’ve had with family and friends. Some people try to comfort themselves and/or convince me to reconsider by asking what kind of pro bono work I can do for disability rights om the side. Some people insist I’m making the  wrong decision, because I would be really good at disability rights, and when I try to explain to them that I’m not happy for all of the reasons I’ve just explained to you, they counter by saying they’re just looking out for what’s best for me. There are layers of problems with that statement that I’m not going to dissect for you. But I think the fact that I felt I had to write a whole blog post justifying my decision and that I’m really nervous about how people will take it says a lot.

 

Which brings me to the last reason I decided not to go into disability rights: I found something I really want to do. Not many people know this about me, but I am a huge astronomy nerd. Like huge. So when my property teacher mentioned space law, I started looking into it, and I was totally fascinated. I even applied for an internship at NASA for my first law school summer—I didn’t get it, but that didn’t dampen my interest in space law. So at the end of my summer internship with the Department of Ed, when other interns and I were sitting on the floor of the file room, talking about what we would do if we could do anything in the world, and I said “I would be a space lawyer and work at NASA,” and another intern said, “Jameyanne, you go to Harvard Law, if you want to do that, you can,” I realized she was right. It’s a really niche field, and I don’t have much of a science background, but I decided to go for it. And I have been a lot happier since. My parents have said that I just light up when I talk about space law in a way they haven’t seen in a while, and friends have told me it’s just great to see me make this decision and go for it. And fun fact, two days after I made this decision, I met my Neutron Star, which pretty much made it official.

 

This year, I’m splitting my summer and interning at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal government laboratory in Maryland, and Analytical Space, a private space company in Boston that’s building a network of satellites that use lasers to communicate. I’ve been at NIST for three weeks, and I’m having a blast. And who knows? Maybe one day I’ll go back to school and get that science degree I wish I had.

 

All this isn’t to say that disability rights aren’t important. It isn’t to say that I don’t care about them—of course I care about them—I need them. And it’s not to say that I won’t keep fighting for them in any way that I can. It just isn’t the right career for me.

 

The way I see it, there are two ways to fight for disability rights. One is to be a disability rights attorney. this is really important. We need good disability rights attorneys who care about the issues. But to me, disability rights means more than standing up in court to fight for someone’s right to read Braille, or use a service dog, or have financial independence or the right to vote or the right to not be abused and neglected. Disability rights means standing up and living the life I want to live, pursuing the career I want to pursue, regardless of my disability. It means showing people that I can do whatever I set my mind to, even if I’m blind. There is a lot of value in seeing someone with a disability doing something totally unrelated to their disability. And really, this is the point of disability rights: to let people do whatever they want to, with their disabilities, just like everybody else. As a disabilities rights lawyer, I felt like I would always be defined by my disability, and true or not, I don’t want that. As a space lawyer, well, not even the sky is the limit.

How I See It

Recently the Foundation Fighting Blindness launched its #HowEyeSeeIt campaign to raise awareness about blindness caused by degenerative retinal diseases and to push for a cure. As part of the campaign, people are participating in a blindfold challenge, where they post two minute videos of themselves trying to do daily tasks while blindfolded. One of the suggested tasks is having a friend give you an unknown amount of cash and then you try to pay for a meal with that cash. Another is having a friend ask you to take care of their child for two minutes while blindfolded. These and other activities in people’s videos are offensive.

 

I’ve talked a bit on Facebook about my problems with the campaign, but I felt like I needed more space to explain myself more fully and thoughtfully. So here is how I see it.

 

First, let me be clear. I have no problem with medical research, and no problem with a search for a cure. Personally, I wouldn’t want a cure, but I don’t have a degenerative retinal disease. I’m not going to pretend I know what it’s like to slowly lose my vision. I have some vision, but I have been blind since birth. Three years ago, when the retina in my right eye detached and my eye had to be removed, I lost some vision, and yes, if someone offered me that vision back, I would take it. But I wouldn’t take more than what I had before, because I don’t know what perfect vision is like, so I don’t miss it, and I don’t want it. Also there’s all sorts of brain science that shows that getting your vision back doesn’t mean you’ll be able to see, but I won’t go into that because I only vaguely understand how it works. Suffice it to say that if I had a choice between perfect vision and a million dollars, I’d take the million dollars every time. But that’s me, and I’m not representative of every blind person, and I’m certainly not representative of someone who lost their sight over time due to a degenerative retinal disease. So if they can conduct medical research and find a cure, that’s great.

 

But I find the FFO’s campaign to be deeply problematic. Two-minute videos of people struggling to perform daily tasks while blindfolded does not promote awareness of blindness. Instead it promotes fear and ignorance. If I had to perform some daily task with earplugs in, you bet I would have a hard time doing it, and you bet I would be afraid. But if I was losing my hearing, of course it would be scary, but I would learn, just as so many people who are losing their sight learn to live just as independently as they did before they lost their vision. Two minutes blind can in no way represent years of practice and training. It just can’t. It reduces the blind person to someone who must be pitied, cured, and worst of all, feared. It is a backwards, old-fashioned way of seeing the blind (and I use the word “seeing” deliberately). It is the idea that when you see someone who is blind, or someone with any disability, you are afraid, because you are afraid that could happen to you. It is the same sort of ignorance and fear that I encountered, not everywhere, but so often, when I lived in Italy. These attitudes about blindness can be changed, but what FFO is saying is that it is impossible to be blind and live independently—going blind is the worst thing that could happen to you—and the only solution is a cure.

 

Which brings me to my second issue with the #HowEyeSeeIt campaign. As I said, I have no problem with research for a cure. But there are other options, options that are hampered by the notion that being blind is to be feared. Braille, assistive technology, white canes or guide dogs, independent living skills training, positive public awareness campaigns, these are the ways we combat blindness.

 

Not being able to see is not the end of the world. Trust me, I know. There are strategies for handling money without sight—everything from folding bills to smart phone apps. And a blind parent is just as capable of taking care of a child as a sighted parent. In the midst of efforts to prevent social services from taking children away from blind parents, many times before the parents can even bring their child home from the hospital, this is particularly egregious. It is a result of ignorance, and it is this ignorance and this fear of blindness that FFO is promoting.

 

By living independently, we open the public’s eyes to what we can do and how we can do it. By being open to talking to people and answering their questions, we educate the public, and we break down barriers. If we let the public see us as incapable, as #HowEyeSeeIt does, we only reinforce stereotypes.

 

I have said it before, but I think it bears repeating here: I will answer any question you have. I won’t get offended. I am happy to do it, because every question I answer is one more step towards a society that accepts diversity and does not view blindness as a “disability.”

 

This is how I see it. I am a daughter, a sister, a friend, a student. I write. I play the clarinet. I am a huge nerd. This is who I am. I am blind, yes. But blindness does not define me. Blindness does not stop me. And this is the message that needs to be shared.

More Important Than Fear, or How to Dance Like No One’s Watching

I am sitting on a plane returning to Boston from Orlando, Florida, where I have just spent the most incredible week at the national convention of the National Federation of the Blind. (Note: I wrote this Wednesday but didn’t get to post until today.) I went to the NFB convention because I was a scholarship finalist, but I went with low expectations—worse than low expectations—negative expectations. And now I’m struggling to find words to describe what a powerful and transformative experience it was for me.

 

Here’s a little background for you. I was born blind. I have aniridia glaucoma, which means I don’t have irises (so my eyes can’t adjust to light and dark and I am extremely sensitive to bright light) and that I have higher than normal pressure in my eyes. I do have some residual vision in my left eye. I can see light and dark, shapes, and colors. I used to have similar vision in my right eye until three years ago, when the pressure skyrocketed, my retina detached, I lost the vision in that eye, and I was in so much pain it had to be removed. Now it’s like there’s a big black hole where my right eye used to be (at least in terms of what I see there). I would be lying if I said it was no big deal to me when I lost the vision in my right eye, but on the whole I’ve always been very comfortable with my blindness. I’ve talked about this before, but I want to reiterate it here. Because I was blind, I had a really hard time socially in middle and high school. Among other things, I could never tell where my friends were sitting in the cafeteria and would always end up eating lunch by myself. I thought, at the time, that this was fine with me, because I could use the time to read and write. It was only when I went to college and met friends who banged on the table and yelled for me to come sit with them across crowded rooms—without me having to ask—that I realized what I’d been missing. Just as it was no big deal to me that I’m a blind person, it was no big deal to my friends, and this was fabulous. I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to do this, but I began distancing myself from my blindness, losing touch with my blind friends back in New England, throwing myself into any activity that someone even hinted might be difficult for me, and emphatically shooting down anyone who suggested I consider writing about my experiences as a blind person. Through social media, I saw many of my blind friends become enthusiastically involved with national organizations for the blind, such as the National Federation for the Blind or the American Council of the Blind, but I didn’t understand why they would want to do that. Personally, I never posted anything about my blindness myself except to make a joke or to tell funny stories about Mopsy. That wasn’t how I wanted the world to perceive me. And then, as you all know, I went to Italy, where almost everyone saw me as blind and nothing else. It was in Italy where I realized that I wanted to go to law school and become a disabilities rights lawyer. By advocating for my own independence, I showed everyone in Assisi that a blind person could be independent. I changed minds, and at the end of my year in Italy, people were coming out of the woodwork to tell me that they knew a blind person and they were going to tell them everything I’d done. I thought, if I made such a difference just by existing, what could I do if I tried to make a difference? It was also in Italy where I decided that I wanted to see more representations of people with disabilities in fiction, and that if I wanted to see that, why shouldn’t I be the one doing the representing? Who better is there? At the same time, I was, and still am, honestly, uncomfortable with the idea that I will be perceived as a lawyer whose interested in disability rights just because I’m blind or as a writer who includes characters with disabilities because I’m blind.

 

Last March, I applied for a National Federation of the Blind scholarship. I was hesitant to apply, because I’d heard that the NFB was radical, militant even, and most of all that they are against guide dogs. Since my experiences with Mopsy in Italy were the focus of my scholarship essay, I was sure they would reject me. But my parents encouraged me to apply anyway. Law school is expensive, guys, and as my parents put it, money is money. So I applied, and I won. And I spent this past week at the national convention. As I said, I came with negative expectations. I planned to take the money and run for the hills. I planned to spend the convention making snarky tweets about what happens when three thousand blind people swarm through a hotel lobby.

 

I did make some snarky tweets, because let’s be fair, with three thousand blind people, the jokes are rife for the picking. But I very quickly found that I did not want to stand aside and joke around, and I certainly did not want to run for the hills after convention. The people in the NFB are fighting for causes I am passionate about. They recognize that our society has made tremendous progress towards equality for the blind, but they also recognize that there is still so much to be done, and they are continuing to fight for that equality. Sure, there are definitely some things I don’t agree with, but on the whole, it just makes sense, and turns out most of the things I was told before I went to convention about the NFB were exaggerations or downright wrong. NFB is not against guide dogs. The first lady is a guide dog user. NFB does not believe in complete and total independence at all times. They believe it’s important to know how to be independent and to know that you can, as a blind person, navigate the world without assistance, but it really comes down to knowing what’s best for you in your daily life. They aren’t sue-happy. Rather, they are pursuing change through means that are often the only way to force large corporations to take action. And they are not fighting with Google over the self-driving car because they don’t want blind people to be relying on a machine. They want the self-driving car, which has been hailed all around as an innovation for people with disabilities, to have an interface that will be accessible to the blind, and they want to prevent and combat laws that are already being passed requiring a licensed driver to operate a self-driving car—effectively excluding the blind from an opportunity to expand their own independence. Finally, to me, the NFB didn’t seem radical or militant. They seemed energetic and committed to always moving forward without settling for what we have.

 

At convention, I met so many amazing, intelligent people. I was mentored every day by members of the scholarship committee—writers, editors, lawyers alike. I attended meetings where I learned about exemptions in the fair labor act that allow people with disabilities to be paid substantially less than the minimum wage and the battles blind parents must fight for the right to raise their children as well as what the NFB is doing about it. I learned more about my rights as a blind student, and I screamed myself hoarse for Braille literacy, the Accessible Instructional Material in Higher Education Act (Aim High), the Marakesh Treaty to stop the worldwide book famine for the blind, and accessible fitness equipment. I learned how to navigate an unfamiliar area, like the airport or our hotel (which someone described as larger than the city of Pisa, and I’ve been to Pisa and I believe it), by asking for directions but staying independent rather than just by taking a sighted person’s arm and following them without a clue where they’re taking me. (Like I already said, there’s definitely times for sighted guide, but it’s nice to know how to do things without it.) And I took a ballroom dancing class and learned the basic steps for waltz and swing. I’m normally super self-conscious about dancing, because I can’t see what everyone else is doing and I’m afraid I’m doing it wrong. But here, no one could see what anyone was doing, so not only was our teacher—who was also blind—able to effectively describe the steps, but it really was the perfect time to dance like no one was watching.

 

The only thing I didn’t do was sleep and eat.

 

I also took a 1touch class,. 1touch is a self-defense program designed for the blind. I loved it, and I’m really interested in taking a longer, more intense class and maybe becoming an instructor myself, because I think it’s really important for the blind to be able to defend themselves. We might not want to be called vulnerable members of society, but as long as mainstream culture, and particularly predators, see us as vulnerable, we sort of have to face it that we are. In the class I took, we learned some basic ways to move away from someone who has grabbed you. I also now know how to break someone’s arm. I learned that if someone is simply being aggressively helpful (“Let me seize your arm and drag you across this street you clearly shouldn’t be crossing yourself!”), it’s better to twist free, step back, and tell them you’re all right and that they should ask first next time. On the other hand, if someone grabs you with the intention of hurting you, you want to grab them back and not let go because then you know where they are at all times and you’re in control. But all that aside, our instructor said something that really struck me, not just when applied to self-defense, but when applied to my everyday life: “Bravery is when there’s something more important than being afraid.”

 

I spent nine months in Italy absolutely terrified that I was going to be killed by a maniac with a motor vehicle, and since then, I have been unwilling to even stick a toe outside my comfort zone. It’s safe in my comfort zone. But it’s also incredibly freeing and empowering to walk through an airport independently, without sighted assistance, to find your gate and the bathroom and the food court on your own, to know where you are in the world rather than just feeling like a package that’s being delivered to who-knows-where. It was definitely outside my comfort zone—actually almost everything I did this week was outside my comfort zone—but once I did it, I found that my comfort zone grew to accommodate my new skills.

 

During his keynote address at the banquet Tuesday night, NFB president Mark Riccobono actually said that fear can be a good thing. Fear is powerful, he said, because it tells us that what we are doing is valuable. With everything wonderful comes fear. And we must use our fear to discover and push past our own limits.

 

So as I crossed the stage Tuesday night and received my scholarship award, I made a decision. Not a decision to be brave, which I’ve done before. Not a decision to push away my fears. But a decision to embrace them, to make something new of them, to turn them into strength.

 

Maybe I’ve been brainwashed, but I have decided that I want to join the NFB. (And just for the record, I don’t think I’ve been brainwashed, because there are some philosophies and methodologies I definitely disagree with, and that’s all right.) I want to be a part of this dynamic, energetic, strong organization and join their drive and commitment towards true equality for the blind, not only in the United States, but in the world. I want to dance like no one’s watching and not care if they are.

 

But first, I really, really need to get some sleep.

What I Learned at the Disabilities Rights Center

Last October, after I took the LSAT, I started volunteering at the New Hampshire Disabilities Rights Center. I wrote about this a bit before Christmas, but now I’ve worked there for six months, and yesterday was my last day. I’m about to embark on the epic road trip of visiting law schools, and after that, my landlady and landlord from Italy are coming to visit, but I was very sad to be leaving.

 

I’ve had plenty of experiences where I’ve learned so much in a short time—not just in terms of knowledge but also in terms of myself—and these six months were no exception. I learned a ton, so much, it’s difficult to quantify.

 

I performed research—of the legal sort as well as your garden variety google searches. I learned how to find and read federal and state laws. I learned all sorts of new words, like “pursuant” and “furtherance.” And I researched and wrote a brochure on service animals and the Air Carrier Access Act as well as an article on the rights of students with traumatic brain injuries.

 

After Christmas, I worked with the Help America Vote Act team. We worked on publicizing the new accessible voting machines. We also wrote a pamphlet on creating an accessible campaign—through events, website design, and mailings—and contacted all the campaigns, planned monitoring visits of polling places all over the state to get feedback on the new machines and to check on basic accessibility requirements, and coordinated with the national organization RespectAbility to get people with disabilities to campaign events and to get disabilities rights issues on the table. I even got to do all investigation—by which I mean call a bunch of town clerks, ask them about absentee ballots that weren’t counted because of mismatched signatures, and hope they were honest with me. It was all super fun.

 

I also got to observe several stages of a case concerning denied eligibility of services, from its preparation and filed motions to the pre-hearing conference and the hearing itself. I worked on several stages of a different case myself, drafting Right to Know letters—the New Hampshire state equivalent of a FOIA request—and then I read, organized, and cataloged all the evidence we received from those requests—the discovery part of the case.

 

I did research for our policy director that he used in meetings with the state legislature. I reviewed specific facility policies and compared them to state laws regarding seclusion and restraint practices, and then I drafted a letter highlighting the areas where the facility was out-of-compliance. Finally, I learned about the immensely complicated and scary process of legislative history. (It became much less scary once I found my way to the state library where a lovely librarian found everything for me.) Basically, I went back into the history of a 1947 state law and read the original bills and the notes in the House and Senate journals for the original law and then several relevant amendments, all of this in order to determine the law’s intent. Legislative history is something, I’m told, that most law students don’t do until their second or third year.

 

So yeah, I did a ton, and I learned, and I’ll probably be starting law school in the fall with a bit of a head start. But my experience at the DRC gave me more than that. I had so much fun going to work every day, because every day I was working on something different and learning something new. I loved having lunch with all the attorneys and hearing about what they were working on and how they planned to approach it. And I will be forever grateful for all the support and advice they gave me as I went through the application process for law school, received all my acceptances, and began working my way towards a decision (a decision I still haven’t made yet, hence the epic road trip of visiting law schools I’ll be starting next week).

 

But it’s even more than that. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again many more times, but a year ago, I was absolutely miserable—the rejections for the MFA programs I’d applied to were piling up, I’d decided I didn’t want to get a masters in comparative literature after all, I was not really enjoying teaching, and on the whole I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Somehow, I clawed my way out of that mess of disappointment and uncertainty, and I took all the experiences I’d had and decided I wanted to go to law school. I put all my energy into studying for the LSAT and applying for law school. But at the same time, in just the last few months, everything I thought I wanted to do with my life had been turned on its ear, and right then I wasn’t sure I could trust that my decision to go to law school was really right for me. What if I hated it? What if I discovered something else I liked more? What if I was just unhappy right here and right now but I was still giving up on all my dreams? But after just a week at the DRC, I was confident, and that confidence has only grown over the last six months. Now, I am absolutely sure I am on a path to a career that matters to me and that I will enjoy every minute of. Now, I just have to pick a law school.