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.