Living with disabilities - An introduction to this category

Welcome to the first post of the “Living with disabilities” category. Here, I am going to add posts on thoughts and stories, which might not have occurred to me, or happened to me, if I was not living with a disability.

This disability in my case is blindness. I was born with healthy sight, but after a few years my vision started to fade away. By the age of 16-17 I was completely completely blind due to retinal detachment.

Sure, becoming blind is a loss. I lost the opportunity to get my driving licence, and to find pleasure in looking at old photos. However, losing my sight also opened up new opportunities. This is neither better, nor worse. It is just the path life took for me. If I didn’t lose my sight, perhaps I would have never met people I am good friends with now, maybe I would never have thought of getting a dog, and I wouldn’t have become so interested in accessibility and assistive technology.

In this blog category, I would like to post about various stories and thoughts that are related to my everyday life events and some special adventures, which link back to living with a disability. If you pay attention to details, you will notice that the category title is plural, that is “living with disabilities”. This is because I believe that my disability has common ground with the life of other people living with disabilities. Perhaps, this category will even feature guest posts from other people.

As a closing remark, let me just note the following thought, following disclaimer. I am vision impaired. I am visually impaired. I am disabled. I am blind. I am a person with a disability. I am a person living with a disability. What I am not, is a person who is over sensitive about labels.

I am young, and yet, in my life time it was no longer okay to call people handicapped. You needed to use the label “disabled”. In the last few years, the label disabled wasn’t good enough, and we needed to transition to “people with disabilities”. I also often see human rights people and researchers using newer and newer terms, such as blind and partially sighted, instead of blind and visually impaired. Apparently “impaired” is not a cool adjective. I’m aware of problems around stigma and disability, and I agree with the general principle of using appropriate descriptions of groups of people. However, discussions around labels often feels like the tree, which blocks our sight of the forest of much more pressing issues.

When it comes to a casual conversation, I am VI. I don’t feel any less by referring to myself as vision impaired. When the underground staff calls in for travel assistance, we are VIPs, and we like it.