A few years ago, I was travelling from Cambridge to London and was accused by an irate train guard of faking my blindness. “I saw you walking down the platform – all breezy and easy. You are not special, you know.”
After trying to graciously explain that blindness covers a whole “spectrum of sight loss”, and showing my disability travel card, he decided I should be shamed, and set off on a tirade. Finally, having held my tongue for five minutes, I lost my temper, and I whisked out my hand-painted false eye and put it in front of his face. “Shall I tell you what I am faking? This. My false eye.” There were extensive apologies, and I went home and cried. With anger.
Travelling as a blind person is not easy or reliable these days. Despite good intentions, even when you find thoughtful staff, the obstacles are not simply trolleys and finding the gates or platform. There is still a whiff of paternalism around the assistance offered. It is odd that I am steered into a “special area” at an airport gate or train station, with no information about platforms or delays. Indeed, I am so special I am often forgotten and miss my flight or train connection. I am also frequently offered a wheelchair to get to my plane when I have simply booked guided assistance. I decline politely and say I only need escorting to the gate. Many staff get really annoyed. “Can’t you just get in the chair? It will be easier?” For whom? I don’t need a wheelchair, and it feels wrong to take up the resource others need.
So, as airports and train stations swell with summer departures, I set off with trepidation. Along with the other 2 million blind and visually-impaired people who live in the UK, not only am I worried about navigating train strikes, plane cancellations and unabated fires in Italy and Greece, but I am nervous that I can’t handle the logistics and am “not yet blind enough” to warrant people offering help, or a toxic combination of both. The confusion is that I can see something, and yet I have severe limitations – I am blind in one eye, and my remaining vision is all a bit blurry, like having a Vaseline haze.
I suspect the problem starts with the word “blind” itself. There are so many phrases to describe a whole variation of not seeing that come under the wing of “blind”. There is such a variety of vocabulary. I can refer to myself, for example, as visually impaired, partially sighted, or a person with severe sight loss. Occasionally, I use the word “blind”, but it does not really give a clear indication of how I function. A social worker once visited to consult on mobility training and cooking, and when she asked how I managed my “toilet routine” I could not help but be flippant: “Quite well, but I have a problem with the tango.” She was not amused.
When I get grumpy about the challenges of blindness, I do remind myself that it’s not surprising that people react so poorly. We have inherited polarised historical narratives around not seeing. On the one hand, we have blind prophets and poets with magical powers (think Tiresias and Homer), and on the other severe punishment, with dear old Oedipus stabbing his eyes out. There is also the faking trope, which medieval Christians had a great time with – casting the devil (Satan himself) as a cross-eyed fallen angel, and labelling “non-believers” (particularly those of the Jewish faith) as those who are blind to the truth.
Even today, blindness is regularly portrayed in books and films as exceptional or tragic. We have Al Pacino as the blind veteran who can tango in Scent of a Woman, or Marvel character Daredevil, clever blind lawyer by day and vigilante freedom fighter by night. We have HG Wells’s The Country of the Blind and Jose Saramago’s Blindness, dystopian novels where heroes overcome their “tragic” blindness to survive. It is rare to have a neutral blind hero.
Blind people have also travelled far and wide, long before modern tech and white canes – albeit with a bit of money and education. From the sophisticated blind composer Maria Theresia von Paradis in the 18th century to the over-chirpy memoirs from Helen Keller, (blind, deaf and non-speaking disability advocate) and, more recently, Erik Weihenmayer (the blind climber of Mount Everest) blindness has not stopped people travelling.
A few contemplative narratives counter these inspiration templates, such as Andrew Leland’s recent memoir The Country of the Blind. But there is an underlying trope that blind people are only worthy if super-inspirational. What if you’re, well, just ordinary?
I will not deny that blindness can be difficult to live with in a visual world. For myself, I am a curious lass, so I flail my cane about, yell a bit and carry on. Each person with sight loss will travel and navigate their own way, particularly if blindness happens in later life. Just travelling from home to work, learning to use new tech, even washing-up machines, can make daily life complicated and exhausting.
It would be helpful if we could shift the dial a bit more to the reality of blind lives – and not to perpetuate polarised myths. Solutions I can offer include listening to blind people’s views, not placing disabled people in special areas, and having educated and supportive staff who know that sight and blindness are on a spectrum. Above all, it would be nice to feel we are simply people living our own, not separate lives. I suspect this will take some time. In the meantime, I am off to catch a train. I am special that way.
Selina Mills is the author of Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness
