I was recently given an opportunity to speak at a conference attended by (among others) social workers, HR professionals, mediators and educators. To share a platform with so many innovative thinkers (some of them well-known) was an incredible honour for me.
After I spoke, regarding (primarily) disability and employment, I took questions from the audience. One of the questions has stuck with me in the weeks since that conference.
Is part of the problem the fact that people with visible disabilities embody a very real fear of one’s own potential of acquiring a disability? When facing the embodiment of that fear, do we project our fears onto that person because their reality scares us?
I had to pause and think.
The reality is, we all – as human beings – have things that scare us. Some of us are afraid of heights, while others can jump out of airplanes. Some of us love traveling, while the idea of leaving the comforts of home is terrifying to others. There are gourmet chefs out there who know people who are afraid of burning the house down if they turn on the stove. Whether fear is rational or not, it’s there, and fear is human.
How it relates to disability?
It seems that fear of one’s OWN disability – because it could happen to anyone – IS projected onto the person living that life. You are not likely – at age twenty or forty – to suddenly wake up in the morning and learn you’re Caucasian rather than the African-American you always believed yourself to be. Nor will you wake up tomorrow and suddenly find yourself – at thirty or fifty – attracted only to men when you’ve been attracted to women your whole life. But you could, conceivably, find yourself either physically or mentally impaired or disabled due to any number of variable causes from medical misdiagnosis to vehicular accidents, assaults, or any number of other biological or physiological factors. It’s true that disability shows no particular favoritism; it IS the only group that anyone can join at any time.
To avoid the disability label, sometimes people go to extreme lengths. Vision can be viewed as sacred, even at the potential of costing a child’s life. Disabled people frequently hear that a person they are talking to would rather kill themselves than be disabled.
Is disability so hard, really?
Or are attitudinal barriers – piled on to the challenges of disability itself – really what’s hard about living with a disability?
These thoughts all jumped around in my head as I stood in front of all of those people. I said some of the following in response, and wish I had said more.
Fear of sudden disability onset IS terrifying. If I woke up tomorrow and I couldn’t move my legs, or if I couldn’t hear my husband speaking to me, I would be devastated. I would try and find out anything I could to make things different. If they couldn’t change, if my condition became permanent, I would be sad and angry and terrified. Any major life change IS difficult, and people who recieve a disability diagnosis will go through stages of grief and recovery and acceptance.
That is human.
What ISN’t reasonable or fair is to project your human fear of going blind tomorrow onto the reality of my existance. The resume on the table in front of you is just as present as I am sitting across from you; the two are not mutually exclusive. I’ve had years to learn and to grow, just as you have in your own way. Disability does not automatically stunt one’s emotional growth, though the prejudices and fears of others can stunt professional or academic growth for us.
Your fear of imminent disability is not the reality I live with every day. If I scare you that much, is that really about me?
And yet I take the fall for it. My disabled friends take the fall for it. We get passed over for job after job, for opportunity after opportunity, not because we don’t have the skills, but because of someone else’s own personal fear.
It’s time to put fear where it belongs, into perspective. Just as I doubt I will ever know what it’s like to be a Sumo wrestler, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you may nevver know what it’s like to be blind. And that’s okay. You can wonder what YOUR life would be like if you went blind tomorrow, just as I can ponder what I would do if I lost my hearing. But what I cannot do – and what you must not do – is to take those fears and questions and uncertainties and place them on the shoulders of those who embody that reality. Our shoulders are not meant to bear your fear, but our hands are capable of providing help and guidance and productivity to your organization, your school or your company. Maybe in ways you never would expect.
Life Unscripted 
Yesyesyes! Thank you for this.
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It’s been noted whilst I’ve been job hunting that employers are more willing to hire people who can see. either they don’t acknowledge a resume at all or they send you their standard email saying no or they ring and say no. I’ve just recently switched to another employment agency as I’d gotten sick and tired of the other agency not doing their share and making it as if I’d been doing all the work, plus they would market me to employers and they wouldn’t always tell me where they’d been or the results so I never know why the answer is no but there’s one thing that is clear. employers only want to hire people that can see. far as I was concerned the agency I was with were just not really clued in on how to assist somebody who was blind.
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I have no doubt of this. My own experience has proven this true. Fortunately I am now in a position to be gainfully employed. I often say that I am where I am at due to the right combination of good luck hard work, and a terrific support system. I am not so arrogant to think I did everything myself to get to where I’m at, nor can I discount the hard work I put in to get me here. But remove any of those three elements – hard work, networking, and the hand of fate/God/luck (whatever you believe in) – and no one would be where they’re at. With employment of people with disabilities, I think, the combination of these things needs to be much more intertwined than those without.
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thanks for your response. I will ask this though. if you were with an employment agency and the plan was to go around to as many employers as possible each month is it standard across the board that if you don’t fulfil your obligations for the month that an agency can just exit you from their system if you don’t go around to employers? remembering that it’s all good and well to go around to employers and hand in resumes but get little to no acknowledgement.
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In response to your question about obligation and searching… it depends on the agency. I did work with an agency while I was out of work, hoping to network and have someone advocate on my behalf if they discovered positions I didn’t. The expectation was that I would spend a certain amount of time job-hunting – whether it was at their facility or on my own time. Since I was already providing a list of job applications for Employment Insurance purposes, I sent them a copy as well to show how many jobs I was applying for.
The rationale was that there had been clients who had expected the agency to do everything for them, and that they didn’t have to do anything for themselves. That’s not how I roll (as readers to this blog who know me in real life can attest). Agencies can be helpful in assisting people with disabilities to find work, but IMHO it IS up to us to do as much of the leg-work as we can.
I can’t speak to your particular situation, being dropped from that program because of not sending out resumes, but I would see about confirming what the expectations are of job-seekers and go from there.
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I dealt with a different kind of fear. I didn’t realize this until recently talking with a Uber driver one day. I had a great job at a multi-national bank where I am the one who made the job accessible for myself and a co-worker. That soon spread to me doing the same for other departments at my location and then other locations around the United States.
I wrote training materials and usage guides for each job as well as training materials for the person who would be training the new blind employee. There were lots of meetings, phone conferences involved with doing this. There were often calls from the other locations when the new employee or their trainer had a question.
I soon experienced some negative things such as no annual increase in salary and then refusal to get hardware replaced.
I discovered in this conversation with the Uber driver that my unit managers who were causing the issues for me were in fear of their jobs because of me. I received many awards, had access to things on the computer they weren’t given access to, and had things other employees weren’t given access to. I had a direct phone number to my desk, email, etc…
So it was their fear that pushed me over the edge and I quit the job. I learned soon after that one of the managers who was causing me problems was fired after 22 years with the bank. I was offered the option to return to my job but refused as other things in my life were changing.
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An interesting take on this. I think this fear – the fear of losing one’s job because of an employee with a disability – is more rare than the fear of disability itself.
But it definitely gives some food for thought.
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You are absolutely right on all counts here, I think.
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You’ve done it again –another powerful and thoughtful piece by blindbeader. I wrote a post for my Safe &and Sound blog three years ago called Do We Fear The Blind in 2014. It can be found at http://bethfinke.com/blog/2014/01/10/do-we-fear-the-blind/
Mine was a kind-of-sort-of critique of a NY Times article with that same title, but your piece today has far more punch. Thank you for speaking to these groups for all of us, and then for sharing your words in this blog, too.
_____
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Thanks for sharing your post. I’m going to read it now. 🙂 I have edited your comment for readability (the HTML didn’t translate well). Hope that’s OK!
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This is brilliantly written and I’d agree with a lot of what you said. It might be uncomfortable for some to admit but only by being honest and facing up to what’s actually going on, will we as a society start to change anything at all! Thanks for sharing
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