Therapy Bits

When people learn that I’m blind, there’s often a pause — that half-second of silence that hangs between us like an unspoken question. It’s the same pause I’ve come to recognize in countless encounters: at the grocery store, during job interviews, in conversations with strangers, even with new friends. It’s the pause of recalibration — the moment they rearrange their mental picture of me.

I can almost hear the gears turning: What does that mean for them? How do I talk to this person now? It’s not unkindness, exactly. It’s discomfort, born of unfamiliarity. But it’s remarkable how much weight that discomfort can carry — and how it shapes the way people relate to me.

The truth is, most people’s hang-ups about blindness have little to do with blindness itself. They come from what people imagine blindness to be. For many sighted people, blindness is synonymous with darkness, helplessness, or tragedy. They think of the world closing in, of losing freedom. So when they meet someone who’s blind, they unconsciously project that fear. They expect to meet someone diminished — and when they don’t, it confuses them.

I’ve lost count of how many times people have said, “You don’t seem blind.” I know they mean it as a compliment, but it’s really a window into their expectations. What does “seeming blind” even look like? I still laugh, make jokes, have a job, fall in love, burn dinner, get annoyed when my phone dies — none of which blindness has taken away. But people expect a kind of perpetual sadness or dependency, and when they don’t see it, they don’t quite know where to put me in their mental map.

There’s also the hang-up of pity. Pity has a distinct tone — soft, hushed, and syrupy. It’s the voice people use when they say, “I’m so sorry,” as though I’ve just confessed to a death in the family. It’s meant to be kind, but pity is a heavy thing to carry; it presses you into the role of someone to be helped rather than someone to be known.

What most people don’t realize is that blindness, for me, isn’t a tragedy — it’s just a fact. Like having curly hair or being left-handed. It shapes the way I move through the world, yes, but it doesn’t define the value or texture of my life. I experience beauty every day — through music, voices, textures, the warmth of sunlight through a window, the rhythm of a city. My world isn’t “dark.” It’s vibrant and layered, just in a different language of perception.

The other big hang-up people have is fear — fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of offending me. They’ll stumble over words like “see” or “look,” as if those are forbidden. (“Did you see that movie? Oh, sorry!”) But I do see movies — I just experience them differently. I don’t mind sighted words; I live in a sighted world. What I mind is the way people pull away, edit themselves, make things awkward that don’t need to be.

There’s a quiet loneliness that can come from being treated as a symbol instead of a person — as inspiration, or tragedy, or cautionary tale. I don’t want to be any of those things. I just want to be met on ordinary human terms.

The truth is, blindness reveals as much about other people as it does about me. It shows me who’s able to look past what they’ve been taught about disability and who gets stuck in the story they’ve inherited. The people I love most are the ones who stop performing sympathy and start engaging with curiosity — who ask real questions, who treat me as equal, who aren’t afraid to laugh or mess up.

If I could ask one thing of the sighted world, it would be this: let go of your fear. Don’t imagine my life as a dimmed version of yours. Just listen. Ask. Learn.

Because the funny thing is — the more people try to see for me, the less they actually see me.

And if you’re willing to look differently — really differently — you might just discover that blindness isn’t what you thought it was at all.

Hang Up – Word of the Day Challenge