The New Year provides an ideal opportunity to reflect on the passage of time, both another year and another decade. As a self-identified self-improvement junkie, this is one of my favorite seasons. I cherish the opportunity to assess progress and prioritize new goals.
An area of my life worthy of reflection in 2020 is my lack of 20/20. And yep, I’ve now exhausted the vision-related puns. This has been the first decade I've lived legally blind, and along this journey I’ve learned about myself and my values, identity and intersectionality. I started the decade timid, insecure, and desperate to conceal my vision loss and its pervasive effects on my life. I used assistive tools, but I tried to limit the extent to which others saw me adapting. I jokingly blamed my vision-related blinders on being clumsy or having a poor memory, because I feared the repercussions of exposing myself. Over time, I’ve learned not to feel shame for doing things differently. I’ve gained skills using my other senses, such as listening to text at high speeds and applying make-up by feel. As I began accepting and embracing my vision loss and my disabled identity, I moved into more disabled spaces. I trained (and since retired) my first service dog, completed training in orientation and mobility (i.e. use a white can and listen to traffic signals), learned the basics of Braille, and wrote one published academic paper and over forty blog posts related to my lived experience with blindness.
I’m grateful for these insights and experiences, and I will continue working on my relationship with my disabled identity in this upcoming decade. Living with a disability requires immense self-advocacy, and assertiveness has not historically been my strongest attribute. Whether I'm asking for a friend to guide me or negotiating reasonable accommodations from an employer, I hope to continue improving my ability to identify and communicate my needs across diverse settings. As an academic, I spend considerable time in my head. I love playing with new ideas and thinking about how to communicate them. But, I tend to get a bit stuck. I have nearly 50 somewhat-written blog posts that I “still need to finalize.” Moving forward, I strive to do more and think less in order to share more of my self and my work.
In line with this goal, I am going to post this before vetting it thoroughly and tweaking it relentlessly. This is what it looks like to voice vulnerability and I’m doing it in 2020.
