On Being the Only One

Am I alone? The only benthic creature scrawling along the bottom of an othered ocean. I felt alone. I knew my great-grandfather was Blind, but he lived across a country and the stories I heard about him celebrated his refusal to use a cane or give up driving – his tendency to use his blindness as a method of sexually assaulting women. He held me as a baby and I’m glad that’s all the time I spent around him.

I happened upon disabled comrades as a child, but growing up my disability was hidden from me. Everyone “doesn’t” see this way, right? Dark is dark, duh. You have to look directly at things to see them, fucking duh. I grew up othering disabled people as I am now othered myself. As I was othered, I now know, by people who knew better than me. I grew up functionally alone and artificially divorced from my community. Ignorant to the skills I could’ve been using for two decades. Convinced that my Blindness was something that should be fought until it could be cured.

I needed someone and had no one.

I polled my admittedly measly Instagram following and more or less confirmed (with an incredibly small sample size, you can find the numbers at the end) what I already know. Most folks in my life do know another cripple, but most don’t know another Blind person. I’ve also asked some people who don’t follow me on Instagram and their responses generally mirror those results. For better or worse, I am the only Blind person in most of my friends’ lives. Meaning I am the only real source of tangible information and experience that they have to help them understand Blindness. My therapist and my doctor, two people with keystone professions in the community, echo this sentiment. My ophthalmologist, who is the only retina specialist in my city, has seemingly never met a Blind person given the way she talks to and about me. There is a building full of Blind people in Duluth, Minnesota; I know I am not the only one here, but I somehow remain unconvinced.

Before I dive into the ramifications of this I need to address why it happens. Which is no simple feat and pulls on threads from all corners of disability theory and the reality of our constructed world.

While Ugly Laws in the United States were repealed back in the 1970s, the stains they left on expectations for disabled people have not been hit with a jug of Mister Clean. Our society is still built on an expectation that disabled people should not be seen nor heard nor smelled in any real capacity. Instead of making the buses and bus routes more accessible, a poorly-funded fleet of vans drives disabled people around at a (comparatively) premium price. Instead of building public necessities like grocery stores and pharmacies in accessible places with accessible infrastructure, society invests in services like DoorDash and other delivery services that, what do you know, cost a premium while paying a pittance.

Restaurants, bars, pubs, cinemas, theatres, clothing stores, hardware stores, doctor’s offices, hospitals, arcades, city halls are not built nor positioned in a way that allows disabled people to access them with the same absent-minded casualness of the pre-disabled. While Ugly Laws aren’t around, the roads and buildings we use were constructed when they were. The zoning laws were written when they were. The academic disciplines were designed when they were. The intersection between disability and racism and feminism is incredibly important to study, not only because the experience of a Black disabled person is vastly different from that of a white disabled person, but also because it is not enough to not be ableist.

You have to be an anti-ableist.

We sustain a positive feedback loop positive feedback loop. Disabled people can’t access public services so said services don’t think about disabled people and so they never make said spaces accessible and so disabled people can’t access them. Quoting my therapist, there is nothing regarding disability in the entirety of the social work program at the university she got her degree from. Social work, damn near by definition, should have an entire fuck off year based on disability studies, and yet a major institution in the area doesn’t so much as look at a cripple. In my own pedagogy I have to constantly shove disability into what I teach as none of the standards, state nor federal, nor the resources, teach to or about disability.

During the initial drafting of this very essay the United States Department of Justice released a memo that further threatens the ability of disabled people to live in their communities.

Of-fucking-course folks tend to only know one disabled person. It’s by design, you have to seek us out, sniff out our canes like the kinky seagull you are.

I am a very angry cripple. I have a particular view of the world that tends towards enacting violence against the normate oppressive class and I struggle to find joy in my Blind identity. I find heaps of pride, but joy is scarce. The folks who count me as the only Blind person in their life miss out swathes of perspectives that are vastly different, but equally valid to mine. Which is a genuine shame, as not every Blind person needs to, nor should, be as angry as I am. It is discouragingly wearying. A brutal reality of being disabled is a tendency towards the tired, I know I feel it. The throbbing pain in my eyes and the headaches that reap down my neck. Flare ups and the necessity to “pass” just to participate in the simplest of activities. Disabled folks shouldn’t have to be angry and they should sustain themselves with joy and pride and whatever else.

But if you only know me, you only know the anger.

Worse than knowing me (I know, how could there be anything worse), if you only know one of those self-hating cripple like Texas Governor Greg Abbot, you’ll only know hate. There are heaps of those, I used to be one of them. The folks who advocate for eugenics and the further exclusion of the disabled. The folks who reject their disability to the detriment of themselves and the society immediately surrounding them. Disabled people who advocate for cures and only cures and cures as the only aspiration that any advocates, allies, or cripples should ever dream of. If your one is one of them, you’re fucked.

I would know, as I struggle with accepting disabled realities beyond my own. It is a labour to be anti-ableist, one that disabled people have to experience as well. I have to make sure that I keep my ears open to the experiences of other Blind people. Within reason, of course (is this a tease for a future essay based on my perception of a certain participant on a certain disability fetishising dating show?). I, and y’all with me, need to make sure that we are always seeking out a broad sample of experiences to shove in our craniums.

The loudest I have ever heard a gaggle of student brains think is when I forced them to consider how eugenics and pro-choice reproductive philosophies come into conflict. Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, the granny of the modern critical disability movement, disagrees with anyone who wants to abort a fetus that will be born with a disability. Many disability advocates agree with this position as it is essentially eugenics. Rosemarie and many, if not most, other disabled people feel that a congenital disability has no fundamental bearing on the quality of life on a potential human. Again, these folks are staunchly pro-choice, but if your choice is primarily influence by the presence of a disability then said choice should be nullified.

I can empathise where they are coming from, but I must also remind folks that disability is expensive. Disability is messy. Disability, in this moment in the United States, is inherently painful. Saying that disability is not a meaningful factor towards being content in life is a pure expression of incredible privilege. If prospective parents know they do not have the money to support a disabled child, what should they do? If a parent is shaken by disability before the child is even born, to the point of wanting an abortion when they get the prognosis, does that not say something about how they will potentially treat that child?

To put a potentially cruel point on this, did Rosemarie Garland-Thompson ever hear her parents call her a mistake when they thought she couldn’t hear? Did she ever feel the shame of knowing that her medical expenses were pushing her family into further poverty? Can she say that her parents hid her disability for years and gaslit her into thinking she wasn’t disabled and therefore stole formative years of learning from her that resulted in both financial and emotional burdens that now had to be shouldered alone as a fledgling adult in the world (this question technically isn’t fair as her disability is very visible, but then again none of these questions are really fair)?

I don’t have an answer to this conundrum nor will anyone ever have an answer to it, but the wisdom it sows is reaped from the collective experience of disabled people en masse. My own experience of shame and gaslighting adds important context to someone else’s experience of acceptance and love. Together we can paint a whole greater than ourselves and find nuance, a criminally neglected practice, in a screwy reality.

Friends have anecdotally told me that they’ll cite me out in the wild when they encounter ableism or need to score a date using a fun Blind fact. I’m proud that I spring to mind, any educator begs for such recognition, but I do fear for them. Do they not have other Blind people they can cite? Have they read the books I’ve recommended? Are their bibliographies only two lines, Casey McGill and Matthew Murdock, and do they realise a proper works cited is broad, broad, b r o a d?

I can’t pretend that I don’t enjoy the image of people roaming around capturing various disabled people and marginalised groups like Pokemon, but please don’t do that. You ultimately can’t collect friends based on their characteristics, but with the world wide web you can roam around soaking in the thoughts of anyone you generally wish. I think folks have a tendency to push against this, even if they don’t want to admit it, but existing in a society, even reluctantly, comes with responsibilities and education is just about the foundation of your pyramid of responsibilities. Education does not end with graduating secondary/high school. It does not end when you drop out. It does not end after an associate, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate degree. Your education is not limited to your profession, your hobbies, your own identity, your own future, or your own experiences. Your education ends when you die. Your participation in society necessitates interactions with other people. You are burdened with a certain amount of power over the lives of folks you’ll never touch.

If you don’t know why we should expand the definition of what a “blind cane” is and you think it’s a waste of time you shouldn’t vote “NO” on a ballot, you should read a book. If you don’t understand why disabled people are so terrified of U.S. conservatives you shouldn’t insult them and move on, you should fucking listen. People hate to hear this next bit, you should be reading about these things anyway. If, as I suggest everyone should be, you are anti-ableist you should be seeking these perspectives out. You don’t need a degree in disability studies to be able to effectively advocate for disabled people.

This naturally expands beyond just disability and it is dangerously easy to succumb to habitual ruts. I know many people that will only read romance novels or only watch anime or only subscribe to news that pertains to the stock market. I find this repulsive behaviour. If you are not constantly evaluating the media you digest and looking for blind spots then you are not, and I truly mean this, a good person. You might be an okay person. An alright person. But you are not a good person. I don’t scream this from a particularly tall horse as I, as a Homo sapien, too grow lazy and complacent and occasionally have to slap myself into realising that I need to read a few books written by Black authors. Or read a short story collection written by an Iraqi writer. Or listen to an interview featuring a wheelchair user.

We collectively have to make sure that our comrades never look around our lifves, gulp, and think, “I am the only one.”

Poll results:

Only blind person you personally know? 12/18 said yes

Only physically disabled person you know? 2/15

Only blind person you follow? 9/12