Getting back to my writing homework series, it’s been so long I forgot the assignment for homework #3. It says “Flash Nonfiction” and I think it was some kind of thing where you set a timer and write for 10 minutes type of thing. I must have been mad that day, because basically I bitched about “The Public,” which is what disabled people call the people that we deal with on a daily basis. But I forgot that other people don’t get what we deal with on a daily basis, so I got a lot of questions from my teacher and classmates about why this woman was harassing me. Well, she was harassing me because I was walking down the street while blind. That happens literally every day to every blind person I have ever known. It just is. But the students in my class thought I must have done something to provoke it. Nope. Just minding my own business being blind. It happens so often that we forget others don’t deal with things like this very often. So, it was a good lesson on code switching and remembering that in some ways, being disabled really is a different cultural experience all together. No blind person would read this and be confused about why a woman was harrassing me because they live it. If I am going to write words that non disabled folks want to read, I am going to have to put it in the language they can understand.
I was using my burrito bag to cross the street, although I couldn’t explain that to this stranger who was admonishing me. I mean, I was using my guide dog, my knowledge of one-way street patterns in downtown Portland, and a smidge of hearing. But I had noticed that I can always get a good vibration with a paper bag with handles and a small amount of weight to it. By holding it loosely in my fingers and turning it 90 degrees, I could tell whether the cars were going in front of me or not by the way it vibrated. This Chipotle bag with a burrito in it turned out to be a choice weight for this task. But “Leave me alone with my burrito bag!” was not going to be of any benefit to me except to make me look crazy.
They say that someone who has put in 10,000 hours into a skill will master it. We understand this to be true and we respect it with certain skills. We respect that a good pianist has put in hours of practice. We know of Olympic level figure skaters who got up at the crack of dawn before school since they were 6 to get to that level and we admire that. Some skills aren’t so obvious. A zookeeper comes to find a random visitor intensively staring at a certain fish in an aquarium. The visitor says, “This water needs a better pH, it’s too acidic for this fish.” The zookeeper is confused until the visitor explains that she is a renowned marine biologist who specializes in this type of fish. The zookeeper’s confusion instantly turns to respect. A long conversation follows, and calls are made to correct the issue. We know that years of study and practice allow for many people to develop special skills that we don’t have, and we defer to their expertise.
I have over 50,000 hours in being a person who has found alternatives to vision and hearing by now. I have also had a good 10,000 or more hours of formal study in nonvisual techniques. It is a unique skill, I understand that. But it is a skill that is not respected, or even seen to be a skill at all. No one can deny that we are a visual species, and vision is convenient in its instantaneousness. But nonvisual skills are not substandard and lesser. In many cases they are better. I laugh when my airline seat gets changed out of an exit row. Who do they think will be better at finding the handle of the escape hatch over the wing in the chaotic darkness of a plane crash? Who is the one who finds and manipulates ways in and out in the dark every single day? I’ve seen how you all lose your shit when you have to do some corporate trust exercise under blindfolds. You barely function. You mistake that experience for what it is like to be me, a person who has a unique skillset. With maybe 10,000 hours of work, you would have it, too. There won’t be time for that in a plane crash. But my expertise is not deferred to. It’s not trusted or even seen. Who is really in the dark when they don’t understand that facts come from the wind, the chain link fence, or a burrito bag?
Writebook 