Astrid’s Journal

I just found out that a woman whom I remember from some blindness lists and who is an active NFB member, has joined a preemie list and raised concerns about her blind daughter’s possible additional issues. In one sense, I’m surprised to find this woman here, admitting that her daughter struggles in school. The reason is that I often feel sort of intimidated by her writings to the blindness lists, where she often shows off about her child’s accomplishments, and points out that every blind person who isn’t as accomplished as they should be, should visit her and take some lessons from her kid. Yet as I thought further, I realized that, if you truly believe at the gut level that, with proper training and opportunity, blindness can be reduced to the level of a physical nuisance, you must actually seek to explain possible difficulties by something else - and the involved parent would choose to have their child evaluated for genuine problems before carelessly assuming they’re lazy or manipulative.

I often assumed it all worked the other way round. I mean, one of the reasons why I’m not particularly active on blindness lists anymore, other than for informational purposes, is that the first thing the people there yell whenever someone on the list or in a newspaper article doesn’t appear to conform to their standards of success, is “low expectations”. Usually, I am the one to point out that perhaps this person has other issues - identified or not - that may cause him to be not as independent or successful as the blindness community would like its members to be. I never meant to blame any failures on labels - because, after all, other disability groups claim (to a lesser extent) that their members’ disabilities don’t hinder their success, either -, but to point out that blind people are a varied group of people, with all individual strengths and weaknesses and a group among which other difficulties are not less prevalent than among the general population.

There is still a reason why you might look for labels, particularly if those labels can help you find appropriate services, treatments and copign strategies. I was labeled autistic, initially, not because I wanted a label, but because I wanted help in dealing with the meltdowns - and the blindness field couldn’t offer me that help. Now, as you get to understand your labels better, they invariably become things that you can use as explanations. But is saying that my need for clarity and structure can be explained by my autism, any different from saying that my need for braille can be explained by blindness? I don’t think so - only people are more likely to assume that I can learn to be flexible, than that I can learn to read print, simply because people always tend to asume that mental problems are more easily cured than physical ones.

But oftentimes, I interpreted the attitude the “blindness can be reduced to a physical nuisance” people had, to mean that, because someone’s only identified disability is blindness, they must somehow be able to achieve - and if they don’t, they must not have been expected to achieve. My parents still hold the opinion that I am only blind and have no other significant difficulties, and, from this point of view, draw the conclusion that I must be able to live independently and go to university. They claim I’ve been made dependent on care providers so that I figuratively cannot wipe my ass without a support worker present. This is not the case, but even if it were, so what? Does that mean that autism is as bad as the curebie movement claims it is, or that I still don’t try hard enough because I should be intelligent enough to do all sorts of things? In my opinion, it means neither. The autism label is useful in explaining some of my difficulties and directing me towards services, treatments, and coping strategies, but it doesn’t define me - just like my blindness label doesn’t define me -, simply because a person isn’t their labels.