I first experienced mild disability when I acquired a physical, work-related injury in my early 30s. It wasn’t the end of the world and I learned to adapt in my work and personal life. At age 49 I lost the sight of one eye as a result of a haemorrhage, and I’ve learned to cope with the vision impairment and some quite disconcerting side-effects.
Throughout the years since, I’ve earned a masters degree and am now approaching the end of a doctoral degree. The physical and emotional challenges have made the journey more demanding than it might otherwise have been, and at times it has taken all my determination to not give up. Nevertheless, I’ve achieved things I wouldn’t have dreamed of when I was younger. But the most challenging thing of all has been other people’s perception of disability.
It has been my experience that if your disability isn’t visible it doesn’t exist in other people’s minds. ‘Your eye looks alright’ is indicative of the thoughtless things that even some well-educated people say. Because they can’t see the scarred retina they can’t get their head around the fact that you have a disability. On the other hand, because vision impairment slows down the pace at which you live and work, some interpret the slowness as mental impairment or even laziness.
I would ask people to please look deeper and understand that many disabled people are very gifted, capable, and industrious.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License