Three Exclamation Points, Being Pretty Visually Impaired, and What We Choose to See.
Again. I'm so bad with the titles.
Yesterday, I told a woman who was correcting my grammatical error via email that she was being hurtful in how she conveyed her criticism.
For those of you who would like the same lesson, three exclamation points in a row, like this—!!!—is not kind when criticizing someone via email.
She responded by telling me that my grammar pained her and she told me to consider the exclamation points redacted.
I took a risk telling that woman that how she was emailing me was hurtful to me. I knew that she could hunker down and not see my point of view or she could.
I still took that chance because I’m a bit tired of people not seeing how their interactions impact other people in small ways (like that email) or ways that are a lot bigger.
Also, yesterday, I was talking to a woman whose son is running for office. We were on the phone and she said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. They just refuse to see it.”
And I told her, “Sometimes I think people create the truths they want for themselves, for their lives, and those truths might not be based on facts, but they become truths to them.”
We build our world piece by piece from the moment we step into it. We choose what to notice, what to see, what will impact us, what we respond to, and how we respond, right?
When I was born, they thought I was blind, but I didn’t know that then, obviously. I just knew that I was there, and my world was mostly smells and touch and sounds.
Not seeing seemed normal to my one-year-old self just as having no depth perception at all feels normal to my current something-year-old self.
I didn’t know I was missing anything at all until I started to see, when the nothingness became blurs became faces, when the world didn’t become clearer, but wasn’t quite such a smelly, blobby mess, when I reached out to things there were four of them, sometimes eight, and then eventually just two and then one.
After my eye operation, when I was one, the bandages on my face keep everything dark, so dark, there was nothing to try to figure out no doubles of things. No blurs of movement. It was all just darkness. But I knew I was home again, back from the hospital. I knew that home was my space.
The world smelled of pot roast gravy and cigarettes, my mother’s Chanel No. 5, and my sister’s coconut hair.
My sister put me on the floor. The carpet bristled against my knees and palms. Fingers sunk into the weave. Home. This had to be home. Again. I knew this rug. I moved forward across it.
“Will she be okay?” my father’s voice squeaked so far above me.
My mom said, “It’s not like she could see at all before. Anything is better than that.”
The shag rug was warm beneath the palms of my hands.
There were noises of cars on the highway in the distance. My mother’s heels clicked across the linoleum kitchen floor.
Then I found it. The couch, tweedy and rough; it’s a straight wall up, beyond what I could reach. I crawled behind it. It was my favorite route around the living room even when there were no patches, no stickiness on my face, even when my brain and eyes started to work together to see.
My space.
When they took the bandages off my eyes, the light was so blinding, the world so big and overwhelming, that I refused to open my eyes and look.
“Come on, baby. Open them for Mommy,” my mother coaxed as I sat on her lap.
And I did.
That is the family story of it, at least.
My family all cried when my eyes opened and when I blinked fast and hard trying to adjust to a world where objects were more than a smell and a touch, a feeling.
I still close my eyes a lot when I talk. Maybe that’s because sometimes I’m still adjusting to the world where there is so much to smell, to touch, to feel.
When they took the bandages off my eyes, the world was so different than my not-seeing world. I eventually noticed things. White walls were scuffed. Socks had designs on them. Shoelaces were rainbows. The light, all that light, hurt my brain, stabbed into my temples.
“Carrie, look. Look! You can see,” my sister cooed, squatting in front of me and my mom in the doctor’s office. “You can see.”
I closed my eyes, reached out and felt the silk of her hair, grabbed it in my fingers.
When they took the bandages off my eyes, my little self maybe wasn’t sure that I really wanted to see the world with all its detail and brightness, the tears in my sister’s eyes, the doctor’s beard that had something stuck in it, the strange colors of the floor. But I did. I opened them again.
That’s how my family tells it. I remember it through their telling.
Even now, my reality isn’t the reality of others. Because of my early blindness and how my brain developed, I don’t see 3-D movies. Those 3-D puzzles? Don’t work for me. And it’s hard for me to know exactly where my body is in space. I bump into doorways. I walk into coffee tables. People think I’m klutzy, or maybe drunk, but it’s just that I don’t exactly know where my body is.
No. That’s wrong.
I know where my body is. I feel it. But I don’t know where my body is in relation to the world.
I think maybe a lot of us don’t know where we are in relation to our world.
When my husband and I used to run trails in Acadia National Park, he’d go first so I could watch the placement of his feet and put my own there.
For each obstruction he’d yell and point, “Root. Ditch. Rock.” That way I’d know where there were stable surfaces, where it was safe for me to touch the ground.
I’d still fall.
We live in a world where there are so many unstable surfaces—humanitarian crises, dictators, abuse, neglect, poverty, earthquakes that turn our spaces to rubble—and so many times we choose to not see them for what they are.
We choose to not see.
We all have to figure out our space in relationship to the world. Some of us just are a bit more obvious about it. And some of us choose not to do that at all.
But our space is about more than our bodies crawling across carpets, sitting in laps, running on trails.
Our space is about what we’ve inherited, where we’re allowed to ‘be,’ where we’re welcomed and excluded, and where others are or aren’t. Our space is something that we claim, but also something others need to be able to claim, too.
We can’t be blind to that. We can’t choose to only see our own version of the world.
There is a great quote by Audre Lorde, where she wrote, “Your silence will not protect you.”
Our blindness won’t protect us either. We have to do everything we can to see the details of our world and our spaces within it, and where other people don’t have space? Well, then we have to help them claim it. That’s what vision is. It’s about a lot more than our eyes.
I think that’s part of why I write. When I write stories I get to control that space, claim it, for myself and for my characters. How do you claim your sight? Your story? That’s the big question, right? And I think there’s a pretty simple first step.
We have to choose to see.
And we can also choose to acknowledge the impact of how we say and write things. Three exclamation points—unless it’s about something joyous or celebratory—usually might not be cool.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE BECAUSE LEARNING IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT
More about Audre Lorde is here from the Poetry Foundation.
A bunch of resources and information about Martin Seligman and positive psychology.
The PERMA model of wellbeing.
QUICK NOTE.
This blog/newsletter/Substack/whatever will always be free to read now, but it’s also part of how I pay my mortgage.
If a paid subscription is way too big an ask, I’m always thankful for help buying dog treats.
Or, honestly, just sharing that this Substack exists is super cool.
I usually send these emails twice a week.
*My WRITE BETTER NOW posts also come one to two times a week if you sign up for them, too, which you should.
And COMFORTING is where I just have no filter at all and am totally schmaltzy is here. That’s once a week or so.
Note: I will not be terribly, perfectly, grammatically correct.