My Slow, Stubborn, Reluctant Transition to Using a White Cane
How pointless resistance never feels pointless
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One day during my senior year of high school, I was walking through the cafeteria when a guy bumped into me.
“Hey, watch out!” he said, unironically, to a legally blind kid. We knew each other well, too. He knew what he was saying.
“What do you mean, ‘watch out?’ You know I couldn’t see you. You watch out!”
“I’m sick of you always running into people!” he said angrily.
I shoved him against a nearby vending machine, and a friend of mine stepped in.
“Whoa whoa, just walk away,” said the friend.
We went across the cafeteria and sat down. We then watched as two girls got into a heated argument. They got louder and louder until they were screaming, culminating in one of them shouting the F-word at the exact moment she turned to storm off and found one of the schools grumpiest, strictest teachers standing right behind her.
“Weird day,” I bet students in the cafeteria were thinking. Not me though.
I sat patiently, waiting for my drama teacher to come out and explain that both fights were staged. She got everyone’s attention and said her students were studying a style of theater performed in public without telling anyone around that theater is happening. We had just tried it out, and everyone in the room had served as our non-consenting audience. I don’t remember what the type of theater was called or who created it. In my head, it goes in a drawer with things like the artist who put a toilet in a museum because, if you really think about it, what is art? I tend to keep that drawer shut.
Needless to say, the friend who thought he was putting himself in the middle of a real fight was pretty mad. And the one girl had to apologize to the grumpy teacher, explaining the dialogue was semi-improvised and there wasn’t supposed to be swearing. I don’t remember if she got in any real trouble.
But my drama teacher, always (to my delight) an agent of chaos at the school, was quite happy. This was a period in my life when my already low vision was getting worse. I was definitely at the stage where a white cane would have been useful, but I wasn’t using one yet. Consequently, I bumped into a lot of kids in the halls. My drama teacher’s opinion was basically that the kids in our relatively small school knew me and it was their responsibility to watch out. After the fake fight, she told me every time she saw one of them bump into me she hoped I would hit them. I guess this performance was her giving me the chance.
As much as I appreciated this view, there were definitely things I had to work through personally. From the moment I showed up in school, I did not want to have anything to do with things that marked me as disabled. For instance, it took me a few years of elementary school to start wearing my glasses consistently. They were extremely thick and magnified my eyes enormously. The most likely people to point them out, ask awkward questions about them, or state bluntly how strange my eyes looked were always children. When I got older, this didn’t matter. Their total lack of social awareness was cute, and I liked it when I had an excuse to explain disabilities to kids. But when I was their age, it felt more like my classmates were tiny devils who thirsted after the maniacal glee of ostracizing other children for their abnormalities. So I often kept my glasses in my pocket and got by with less sight. As I went on in school, the ostracizing didn’t decline. It just became ever more subtle.
And if I was voluntarily walking around as a child with massively decreased vision to placate the little demons, you know I wasn’t going to start using a white cane without a fight. It’s possibly the one object in the world that shouts louder than any other, “Here is a blind person! Notice how different he is!”
But social shaming was not the only thing holding me back. I think most people can imagine how the process of going blind would be disorienting, anxiety-inducing, and sad. As I’ve written here before, those feelings don’t last, and they don’t define what living with blindness is like. But they are part of the experience of becoming blind. And they are also part of the experience of becoming more blind when you’re already a little bit blind. I was accustomed to having a certain amount of vision that had been the same for as long as I could remember. Losing it would mean once again figuring out how to do all kinds of things, training with new adaptive tools, finding out the fun new ways people would discriminate against me, and much more. Plus, the doctors had no idea how much vision I was going to lose, or whether any lost vision might actually come back.
Given all that, it felt natural to put off taking dramatic steps like using a white cane for as long as possible. The only drawback at the time was the occasional accident.
One day, I was walking around Zurich, Switzerland, where I lived during high school. I was downtown, miles from my family’s home near the city limit. I went to cross a street, but before I could, I ran straight into a sign. As I grumbled and rubbed my forehead, my phone rang. It was a pre-smartphone Nokia. It had screen reading software, but I didn’t check who it was before picking up (young people, please understand it took many of us years to unlearn the maladaptive behaviors from the pre-caller-ID era). I answered.
“Did that hurt?” It was my dad.
“What? Where are you?!” I asked loudly with very teenage embarrassment.
With a very dad laugh, he said he was stopped at the red light across the street on his way home from work, and saw the whole thing.
“Great…” I thought.
My dad was always the first person encouraging me to try this technology or that tool to see if they would be helpful. I would refuse for a while, but eventually give whatever it was a shot and inevitably find out it was great. Then he was always the first person to say, smugly, “I told you so.” He was already telling me I should use a cane. How on earth could he have been at that exact light at that exact moment? What were the odds? Seriously, come on…
Poetically, he is now losing his hearing and staunchly refusing to try any of the technology that might help. Wonder where I got it from…
College gave me an excuse to finally try a cane. Almost nobody there knew me well, so it wasn’t as uncomfortable to explain to everyone why I was making this big change. Also, as I wrote in a previous post, “My vision…had finally deteriorated to the point where…I was forced to admit I needed [a cane] because it was only a matter of time before I bumped into the wrong guy and got punched.”
Over the next few years, my adoption of assistive technology and other blindness-related tools sped up considerably. I’d love to tell you this was because I learned to fully accept and embrace myself. Because I was full of the conviction that blind people should be proud of who we are. To some degree, this was true. But what vision I had kept disappearing, so it was also a necessity.
Several years after college, I was coming home from work to my apartment in New York City. On the subway, I was blinking at all the tiny flashing lights and floating spots now clouding my field of view, realizing how bad things were getting. I decided I needed, for the sake of my own peace of mind, to prove to myself that things were going to be okay if I actually lost all my vision. Once I got out of the subway, I was going to completely close my eyes and try to walk home using nothing but the cane and my hearing. Blind people often recommend learning to use the cane in the first instance wearing blackout glasses or goggles. Otherwise, as I was learning, most people naturally rely on whatever residual vision they have and don’t use the cane to its full potential. But I think I get some credit for eventually realizing the value of this wisdom.
It was rush hour. The streets and sidewalks were teeming and noisy. If you’re wondering whether walking in the middle of that without using vision for the first time ever with no guide was risking the safety of those around me, my answer to you is, “Probably, yeah.” But luckily, no commuters, or tourists, or neighborhood children were injured during the experiment.
In fact, I got home just fine. It wasn’t even that challenging. As it turned out, the way I lost my vision was just about the most gracious way it could have happened. The process was extended and gradual; it took almost 20 years all told. Combine that with the knowledge and experience of growing up with low vision, and I had a lot of latitude. I had time to fight it, and be stubborn. To resist, and relent, and resist again. To develop my skills slowly, at my own pace, as needed. To sort through the trauma caused by the miniature Satan’s without worrying about the trauma caused by a sudden onset of blindness. When the day came for the lights to finally go out, for the last bit of useable vision to dissipate, I’m not even sure I noticed it happen. Sight became in the end what I first thought the cane was: something I just didn’t need.