Tags
Acceptance, Awareness, Blind, Blindness, Disability, Diversity, Equality, Hidden Dissability, Individuality, Life lessons, Non Judgemental Attitude, Oneness, Senses, Sight Loss, Tolerance, Visual Impairement
Explaining sight loss to a sighted person is never straightforward. Their experience of Great Aunt Brenda’s deteriorating sight loss in her 95th year of life may have given a hint of what other’s go through in the hour or two they spend with someone once a month, but it’s not quite enough. The impact on Great Aunt Brenda’s failing sight, after having good vision throughout her life, is massive.
Sitting in the Opthalmology Department this week, snippets of conversations between loved ones merged in the shared space. What I noticed in my hour and a half wait was the gap between the worlds of the sight loss patients and their sighted loved ones/carers with them was pretty big. As the sighted spoke in their sighted friendly language of their upcoming holidays, cinema trips, and renovations at home , the awaiting patients murmered enthusiastic acknowledgments yet didn’t seem to talk much of their own lives. This became even mote gut wrenching to eavesdrop in, when I heard a daughter explain in detail what she saw on her sightseeing trip to Rome with her partner. As she said the words “sorry Mam, I forgot you can’t see” with a chuckle in her voice before carrying on with the next topic of conversation, I wondered if she ever even cared that her mother couldn’t see as her mother sat in silence.
Empathetic understanding is a quality that remains dormant in many, not through malice, but through excess self focus. This was a prime example of one of those moments. I had a feeling that this was not a one-off insensitive moment in their mother and daughter relationship , as the daughter shared with all in ear shot how incredibly full her happy life was. When her mother asked if she could stop in the shop on the way home, the exhaling daughter told her that she would go into the shop for her, as the mother always took far too long due to the fact that she couldn’t see properly. How dare a person with visual problems take longer than a sighted person to do a task, eh? The utter cheek of it.
Over the years, I have heard many people with sight loss being spoken to like this. Having worked with some young people with sight loss through work and my research for Masters Degree years ago, through to amazing elderly people in my visual Impaired bowls club, such examples are more the norm than rare. Ableist comments often slide out of the mouths of loved ones without a second thought to how they are heard. The power of language should never be underestimated when you are in the role of a ‘helper’. Unequal power will already exist when you wear the helping role badge for all to see, which is especially true when you are wearing that badge for all of the wrong reasons.
As social beings, humans need each other. The give and take of life should be as natural as the flow of waves. Your importance is no more or less than another’s. Your needs, wants, and wishes are as important as the needs, wants, and wishes of others. Maybe if you are always doing all the talking and someone is always doing all of the listening, there is probably too much”you’ to have an equal relationship.
The best way to ‘help’ someone with sight loss is to firstly acknowledge that your version of help maybe is not what they really need. Empowering someone to use their abilities in their disabilities to teach you about their life first hand will be a far more useful lesson to you both. Using your eyes as a support to those who can not see, is an alternative language exchange in a shared experience between the two worlds. The loneliness that someone with sight loss could be feeling as their independence dwindles away week by week will need your egoless connection to let them know that they are not alone. Living a sight loss life in a predominantly sighted world can be hindered even more when you use too much visually descriptive language that means nothing at all to the person you are trying to help.
Never underestimate the power of supportive silence between both of our worlds. Create your own language in helping and never assume sight loss consists of nothing but lack that needs to be fixed. Insight gains within sight loss , can give the sighted a whole new perspective of what it truly means to have perfect vision.