Calibration

Calibration

Future Reflections Winter 2015 IDEAS AND PERSPECTIVES
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Calibration
by Jennifer Dunnam
Reprinted from Minnesota Bulletin, A Publication of the NFB of Minnesota, Fall 2014
From the Editor: Jennifer Dunnam serves as president of the NFB of Minnesota. She also represents the NFB on the Braille Authority of North America (BANA).
Many benefits flow from being a member of the National Federation of the Blind. Among them are mutual support and encouragement, the ability to make things happen together that we could not do alone, the sense of community, and the opportunity to share useful information and resources. The collective experience we can call upon is deeper with more of us in the mix, and the more of us there are, ready and willing to participate, the more we can do.
There is one aspect of Federationism, however, that is a bit more complicated to describe. It can apply to each of us individually, whether we grew up blind or lost sight later in life. Participating in the National Federation of the Blind can help us "calibrate."
The word calibrate has numerous definitions, but here is the one that I find relevant, nerd that I may be: "To check, adjust, or determine the graduations of a quantitative measuring instrument by comparison with a standard." Certainly, this is not a precisely relevant definition, since we're talking about human beings. Perhaps I can illustrate my idea with a bit of personal history that is, no doubt, similar to the experiences of many others.
My parents are the best anyone could ask for. They worked hard to ensure that I, their daughter who has always been blind, would live a normal life. They wanted me to be able to take care of myself and to get along and do my fair share in the world. They knew that sometimes they had to be tough in order for me to achieve these goals.
However, my parents were not with me everywhere I went, and they could not always influence the way others treated me. With a few rare exceptions, they did not have exposure to other blind people who could show by example how to live a successful life as a blind person.
Many other people in my early life had little exposure to the truth about blindness. Furthermore, unlike my parents, they did not have the incentive to consider my future. Many people felt sorry for me or constantly told me what an inspiration I was. Most wanted to do all they could to make life easier for me.
Although I was fortunate to receive a good education in public school, I also received many strong messages that I was not like other people, that the rules for me were not the same as the rules for others. During most of my school years, I sat in the very front of the class (or sometimes at the very back), in a different type of desk from everyone else. I was often allowed to leave class a little before the bell, so that the fellow student who guided me to my next class would have time to get me there and then get to her own class. (No independent cane travel training for me until I was twelve, and even then it was very limited.)
It isn't that no one ever insisted that I come up to the mark and meet standards like everyone else. I remember how grouchy I was when suddenly I was expected to start doing more chores. I was offended when a teacher said, "You're responsible for cleaning out that desk just like everyone else." These were important lessons, but they were hard to accept because the messages were not consistent, and I was so often treated differently from others.
One time an article about me appeared in the town's newspaper. It was all about my good grades in school, my climbing on the playground equipment, my school friends, and on and on. It certainly can be argued that there is merit in such an article, showing a positive image of blindness. But none of my accomplishments would have been newsworthy at all if I had been sighted. As a young child I was not mature enough to keep such praise in the correct perspective. I fear I took it all to heart a bit overmuch, thinking that maybe I really was as amazing as everyone said I was.
The other side of being different started to rear its ugly head as I became a teenager. People my age did not want to hang around with me very much. My younger sisters got driver's licenses and could drive off wherever they wanted. I could not even have told you the name of the next street over from where we lived, much less navigated around the city. My sisters and friends spent as much time as they could walking around the shopping mall. It was a struggle for me just to walk around my own school building independently. If I did go to the mall with my sisters or friends, I spent a lot of time waiting. Unless I could talk them into going somewhere particular, they set the course.
The feeling of powerlessness is hard to convey to one who may never have experienced it, but I imagine many blind readers will know what I am talking about. Like everyone else, I assumed this was how it had to be and likely would be for my whole life. To survive, I simply began to adjust to this way of being—the waiting, the loneliness. I began to stop hoping for anything better.
Because of the mixed messages I received and my relative powerlessness, I did not have a good grasp of how to view myself as a regular person, not more and not less than anyone else, though at the time I might have been able to say all the right words. It was all very confusing—to be special but also somehow inferior, to be amazing but also to be pitied and shunned.
One summer during high school, I attended a program at the school for the blind. In some ways the experience was helpful. In that setting, I was not so special, weird, or different from the rest of the crowd. However, most of the crowd was made up of kids with similar struggles. Like me, they had not been viewed as having normal expectations. Like me, they did not know how to deal with low expectations or even quite realize what was happening to them. In addition, there was a strong sense that how much sight one had was a primary predictor of how much responsibility one could be expected to take. Although it was not all bad, the experience did not generally present me with much hope.
Fortunately, I soon met the National Federation of the Blind. I was astonished to discover that my own expectations were actually far too low. I met people who not only walked independently around their cities, but took control of things by hiring drivers rather than waiting and hoping people would be willing to drive them somewhere. I even witnessed blind people taking charge of navigation when riding with a directionally challenged sighted driver, and knowing precisely where specific locations were, even in a mall. After recovering from the shock, I got to work on improving my skills and learning all I could from my new role models.
No less important than the skills, and probably more important in the scheme of things, were the adjustments I was able to make to my approach and attitude. Learning new skills went a long way toward helping me understand that I was not somehow a lesser person than others were. However, it was in some ways a rude awakening to figure out for sure that I was not the least bit amazing. Many blind people were smarter, more talented, and more socially adept than I was.
In this group, one helped with the clean-up, regardless of one's level of sight—no excuses, no special treatment for me. People assumed, respectfully, that I was capable of doing a given task. They would ask if I needed help, rather than immediately scurrying to the rescue at the first sign of questions. If I didn't know how to do something, people would teach me rather than just doing it for me. Kindly but frankly, they let me know if I did or did not do things that would be detrimental to general life success. I learned, directly and by example, how to fit into the larger community and how to do my share. The messages were consistent in this environment, so it was possible to learn how to put the views of the larger society into perspective. I have now been a Federationist for many years, and the help of this organization in this respect remains invaluable.
My experience is not unique to people who grow up blind. Many people who lose their vision later in life start out with the independent spirit that they had when they were sighted. However, as time goes on without a supportive community and without strategies to deal with the constant barrage of well-intentioned low expectations from others, they find it easier to give in. It is easy to stop trying to live the lives we want, but giving in to low expectations can make us dependent and disabled in ways that really are not necessary.
The Federation can help us get that spirit back, and to get the five ingredients of freedom that long-time Federationist Jim Omvig so aptly enumerates in his book, Freedom for the Blind: The Secret Is Empowerment. Here are the ingredients he lists:

Coming to believe, emotionally and intellectually, that it is respectable to be blind.
Learning the skills and mastering the alternative techniques of blindness.
Knowing how to cope effectively and unemotionally with things people do and say because of their misunderstandings about blindness.
Having the discipline, the flexibility, and the work ethic, grooming, and appearance to "blend in."
Giving back, both to other blind people and to society.

I am grateful to be able to calibrate from time to time with my Federation family, people who show by their example how to be a blind person with confidence, class, resourcefulness, and willingness to believe in and help others. We strive to create a space that lets us measure ourselves against normal expectations, to keep low expectations from coming between us and our dreams.

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