August 2008 archive

I am visually impaired, what the state of Texas considers blind, but with a small field of vision that to most people means I’m not really blind.  This was the result of an act of violence committed against me by a sociopath.  A person who believed themselves entitled to their anger, their grievances, their hurts and most of all entitled to live a life based on the false assumption that nothing and no one counted above their own self absorption.  I have nothing to do with such people these days, something that is actually easier to do in real life than here.

Being a tough cookie I fully expected that I would surmount this newest obstacle.  What I didn’t know was that my very way of thinking had to readjust in order to make the changes required for making a life as a blind person.  Being tough just frankly was not enough.  I was going to need to find in myself something more than courage and a stubborn insistence on moving forward.

There was no aspect of my life that was not impacted.  I had to learn new ways of doing what I had always done.  There are things, like driving, that I knew I would never do again.  For everything else my only limitation was refusing to learn how to do it without sight.  I would control the outcome, good or bad, completely through the choices I made.

I had wonderful help, I was fortunate enough to be a Texan with the full support of the Texas Commission For the Blind to face all this.  My first hurdle was simply mobility, getting around in a world I suddenly could not see much of.  That turned out to be a three-year-long training exercise before I was fully confident of my ability to go where I wanted when I wanted on my own terms.  But I got there.

The second life-altering change I had to make was to acknowledge all those messy emotions that go along with such an experience.  My first caseworker with the Commission read me like an open book, a disconcerting thing that blind people do and I suspect the reason people are so afraid of us.  She insisted to me that I must grieve what I had lost and I must acknowledge those feelings or I would ultimately undo all the other work I was being so successful at.  Her suggestion to me was that I set a timer for five minutes, be private and have my pity party and then when the bell goes off be done with it for a while.  It was the best advice I’ve ever gotten in my life.

Throwing a pity party for yourself requires some thought.  I found it important to have a plan of action for when it was over, what I was going to do and how to get started.  The most difficult though is the commitment to actually feeling your emotions, not thinking about them, or writing about them, but actually allowing yourself to experience the whole of your feelings.  That’s where the five minute limit comes in, we don’t actually any of us have more than five minutes of original thought and besides that five minutes can get long when our emotions are not what we want them to be.  What I discovered practicing this is that once I acknowledged and welcomed my feelings they became much more trusting that I would honor them in my decisions and they stayed out of them.  By embracing all my feelings, good and bad, I was able to use my rational mind for problem solving.

My caseworker’s point that any one dimensional solution to a multi dimensional problem is destined to fail.  No one thing that I did, or service that was provided to me by the Commission, helped me to survive being blinded; it took many things all working together.

I did not “get over” being blind, although I can say that there are people in this world insensitive enough to say and apparently mean such a thing.  What I did do though was get with, embrace and accept the new reality that is my life.

My feelings about that are addressed, privately, in my own pity party.  What that does for me is to allow me to go forward in action and make choices that are not directed by those feelings.  They get their hearing and they certainly can be a factor, but they damn sure don’t run the show and for that I am truly grateful.

Do I lack patience with people who won’t deal with their feelings privately and use and embrace them instead of inflicting them on the wider world?  In a word-YES.  It doesn’t need to be done publicly and it doesn’t work as well as simply facing and owning our feelings for ourselves.

So, please folks would you leave me off the invitation list for your pity party?