Re: Do you feel excluded?
@2, great point. In all reality, the sighted realm deals with this internally. Musicians won't click well with sports buffs, artsy people won't mesh well with computer geeks, etc. I'm obviously wildly stereotyping here, but I take your point and believe it to be true of people in general. The blindness is just another way, an exasperated one at that, where those who are blind have their own general interests and sighted people have theirs. The only answer to the sting, imo, is reflected in the attitude I expressed in my other thread, "you can't worry about people not liking you for you. You have to learn to not let it sting so much." I stand by that, but not without saying that it sucks and can be hard and deterring. A one-size-fits-all bias slips in there, so I usually don't bother telling people that whenever they struggle in social situations -- it's just a mantra I myself live by.
It's honestly strange. I can have perfectly nice and flowing conversations with some people sometimes, and other times, it's hard. I guess it goes back to that "find people you connect with" thing, but again, that's hard to do. Blindness's impact on people's ability to get out, meet others, and do it in a way that isn't screaming "hey! Where's the door? I'm blind! Help me!" to those people is super tricky.
I've said it time and time again, and I'll say it once more: I'm lucky. I struggle, yes, but I have friends and strong relationships with a few people. I'm not the only one who feels this way, but I would like to have more, or at least the option to have more. Maybe it isn't just about those channels being inaccessible or unusable. Maybe it's more about the fact that I can't use it, and that's what bothers me. Perhaps if those channels were accessible, I wouldn't even use them. Plenty of sighted people still don't use them, believe it or not. Coincidentally, those are the ones I usually connect with more. Again, coincidence, no causal relationship there, lol.
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