The idea of exploitation seemed to me fraught with assumptions about what a blind person is supposed to do and be—assumptions that insist blind people be poets and prophets, saints or beggars, not lowbrow entertainers.
The sixth sense, second sight, third eye. We are supposed to have both extra-accurate hearing and perfect pitch, more numerous and more acute taste buds, a finer touch, a bloodhound’s sense of smell.
I felt that whipping out the white cane would irrevocably launch me into the kingdom of the blind, and, for many years, I did not want to go there.
For me, distinctions between light and dark have dissolved as my blindness has worsened. I do not experience blindness as darkness or blackness.
The contortions that people will undergo to desexualize me, a blind woman, can be overwhelming.
As I turned into a blind person, my dad metamorphosed into a disabled person.
“Blind and print-handicapped readers do not have the luxury of deciding whether they will go old-school and deny the digital age.”
An awesome braille reader’s fingers move smoothly across the page. My fingers, however, move like caterpillars on Klonopin.
Blindness can be a pain in the ass, and infantilizing, even depressing sometimes, but it is not cancer.
