About this blog - revisited

Well, now having published my 63rd post (to be precise) to this blog last night, I thought I’d take a moment to look back at what it’s about and what I’m doing in writing it. I thought this would be helpful for newcomers to it, to me too and might be interesting to those of you who have been following it for a while.

 

I’m certainly enjoying writing, and giving myself an outlet to describe, moan, cathart, expose and  play with stories… Mainly though, it provides me with the fantastic opportunity to describe and make sense of my experiences as a blind person and to try to find some meaning, some understanding of the motivations that might have influenced them.

 

I’ve been very moved that people are reading it and that some of you have been following it from the start, others dipping in and out or coming upon it for the first time and following it. I love the fact that some of the stories have been brought to life by readers’ own interpretations of them, reflections and shared humour in them. A lot of people have said it’s made them think. I’m pleased about that because my experience of blindness (and of disability) constantly makes me think and wonder,  and I’m glad that this interest is coming over.

 

I focus this blog on my thinking about blindness and my experience as a blind person. I also talk about my experience of disability. Both of these things are  individually and collectively experienced and I have some hope that as this gets shared more widely, other disabled people may come across it and connect with it and something of my thinking might resonate.

 

I’m not towing any line (although I hope that my disability politics aren’t entirely hidden), I don’t promote policies, good practice or particular campaigns. This is not to say that I don’t support or get involved in any of these things, but I want to keep this as a spacious place to reflect and think without the constraints of having to maintain any allegiance.

 

I’ve spent many years of my career working hard with others to find mitigations for the difficulties that we face as disabled people – access barriers, discrimination in the labour market, education system, social care and health services, as well as in the attitudes of still many people in the population. It feels important here and something of a relief not to need to continually offer solutions to the issues I raise, but to be able to describe, name and explore my experiences. I have many solutions for the barriers I face and my life has a continual backdrop of observing what I do and how I experience it, trying to notice what I could do to improve it next time. But there aren’t easy solutions to many of the things I describe here. My view is that the attempts to change the more subtle attitudinal aspects of discrimination through the thing we call ‘awareness raising’ have not worked.

 

I’m conscious when writing here that my oldest friend (Aidan) died a year ago and I feel compelled to reference him here because over our 40 year friendship, we talked about our shared and different experiences of blindness. We developed ways of talking and thinking together about it with the desire to understand the effects on us of segregated education and of the cumulative impacts of daily experiences of being treated as if we were outside the world in some sense. I lost my oldest friend, but also the person with whom I could think about blindness with – it will always remain a great loss.