Many people are handicapped or disabled. I, myself, am one of them. I am visually impaired. With handicap awareness week coming up, I hope that you will take the time to find out what it is like living in our world hanidcapped and that I can at least help you to understand what it is like to be visually impaired.
There are a lot of students, professors and staff here at Hope and in the rest of the world who have to wear contacts or glasses. However, there are very few whose vision is impaired enough that their glasses do not give them normal 20/20 vision. My vision is that bad.
I have been visually handicapped since birth. I have worn glasses since I was one and a half years old. I have also tried every possible correction short of surgery. My eye doctors have given me the best correction they can at this time, yet my vision is still way below normal.
I do not see the world as you do. I see only about a third of the distance most people can. That means that I miss seeing a lot of things. I also see four images of everything, not the way television depicts people seeing mulitple images of everything after being hit in the head, but I do see three ghost images of objects if I concentrate on them. It is very difficult to explain. I have not been able to find a good way of getting across to the rest of the world exactly what I see because I do not know exactly what you see.
There are two incidents which come to mind in trying to relate what I see to what the rest of the world sees. I can not speak for every visually impaired or handicapped person with these experiences, but maybe you can understand that we experience the world differently and that is not something to be made fun of or put down. It is something to be accepted and worked with.
There is one night that comes to mind in trying to describe what I can actually see. Just recently, I was out away from the city in the middle of nowhere and looked up at the sky. The sky was perfectly clear. I normally see at most five or six stars in the heavens even on a clear night. That night however I saw around twenty. I also saw for the first time in my life a constellation.
I have never seen a constellation before because I usually can not see enough stars to make a shape out of them. However, that night I saw the Big Dipper. It was really a neat experience because while I have seen pictures of constellations, I had never been able to see one unaided before. It also hurt because I know that there are so many more stars out there to be seen, but I can not focus on them. I would love to look up at the sky and see it full of starts, but I usually only look up to black.
A different time I got another glimpse of what I am missing in our world. It occured when I was in the fifth grade. My eye doctors were attempting to see if hard contact lenses would be an improvement over my very thick glasses. They had just arrived and I was in the doctor's office getting them.
After a good long time of the nurse fighting to get the lenses into my eyes (not an easy thing considering I was only 10), I was sent to walk around to see how they felt. I went to the window at the end of the hall and looked out. There I saw the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I ran back to the doctor's office to tell my parents about it. It took a long time before I recovered from it.
It was simply a tree. A tree that stood about 30 feet from the fifth story window. The thing that was beautiful about this tree was the leaves. It was the first time I had ever looked at a tree from that far away and actually been able to see that it had individual leaves!
I normally look at a tree from any distance and see a green blur. Kind of like looking at a forest from a long way away and seeing a line of green. In order to see the separate leaves I need to be almost in the tree. I had never been able to experience the complete beauty of a tree because I could not see it well enough.
I know I still cannot appreciate everything there is to see in anything as simple as a tree because I still can not see with normal vision. For a short time I got a glimpse at the difference between what I see and what there is to see. Eventually I got used to seeing things clearer than before and lost some of the newness of looking at each object around me and seeing more of it than I had ever seen before.
One day I wore my hard contacts too long and tore off the top layers of my cornea. I spent the next day and a half screaming in pain. I seriously damaged my eyes. It took a long time for them to recover. I had to give up wearing hard contacts permanently.
Since then I have been through many other vision corrections and have become accustomed to what I can see now. I can now wear soft contacts and wear glasses over them for certain uses. My vision is still and will probably always be impaired. It is part of life which I have accepted. I am very thankful for getting a chance to see something of what I miss. I have lost some of the feelings of seeing that tree, but it gave me something which I will never lose: A glimpse of what I am missing and an appreciation of what I have.
I hope you don't need to lose what you have to appreciate it.