It’s disability awareness month, so I want to write something about it, something that I have not come across before regarding disability, hoping that I can offer you a different perspective.

Disabilities such as blindness is so physically visible that as soon as a normal person comes across a blind person, all they can see is blindness, everything the blind person does is seen through the blindness lens, to the extent that all a blind person has to do is to walk down some stairs without holding on to the hand rail, and suddenly he / she is an inspiration – honestly not holding on to the handrail is just showing off, they would have been an inspiration regardless.

I don’t find daily life activities challenging, I travel on my own, I go swimming on my own, I can go play in Backgammon tournaments anywhere – my main hobby – on my own, I even went to play craps in Vegas myself. What I have struggled with, and still do sometimes, is the limitation and exclusion placed on me because I cannot see.

Take Backgammon and Vegas for example. I am very reasonable at Backgammon, before Covid I was consistently playing in professional tournaments and at least broke even most years- the only blind person who can do it. Yet I have never read a Backgammon book, I cannot watch how good players play, I have to come up with my own way to learn. Could I have been an even better player, given everything being equal, if I had access to books? Almost certainly, but this is a limitation I have to accept, and you can imagine, this is just one of thousands of examples. 

As for Vegas, so much of it depends on visuals, most of the social activities depend on being able to see, I cannot do a lot of things I want to to do, I do not have the freedom to do a lot of things I should not do, in or out of Vegas I simply do not have the freedom to choose what to participate in – can’t play tennis with friends, can’t go for a walk to explore on my own, you name it. Would I be a frequent silent disco goer were I able to see? Maybe, I don’t have a choice.

It’s very easy for anyone to tell me that even with the limitations, I have gotten very far already, or just don’t think about the what-ifs since it cannot be changed. Indeed, over the years, I have become much better at accepting these immutable limitations and exclusions, “if you can’t change the situation, change your attitude.” Still, in many ways, this is a much harder part of disability to deal with than overcoming physical barriers. I could and I did spend a lot of time in university sitting in front of a scanner to scan books from library in order to read, because I had no other way to access reading materials, but there isn’t a way to overcome the fact and thought that I could have learnt much more had I been able to read normally.

What’s the point of this post? Perhaps you can pass it on to someone who is disabled and help them change their attitude, perhaps you’d even recognise that in fact, what I am discussing is not specific to disability – everyone would love to be able to sit in front of a piano and play like Daniel BarenBoim and sing like … whoever, but that’s everyone’s limitation, so everyone has to learn to change attitude, just that a disabled person has to learn to change a lot more.

And perhaps, you’re in a position to help contribute to making and building whatever you’re making and building more inclusive. Take your pick, I’m happy if you took any of these points from this post. 

Thanks for reading.