Faith In Humanity Restored
I am a 28-year-old woman who just recently went fully blind. When I was a teenager, I volunteered with my local youth group to help rebuild Mississippi after hurricane Katrina, and while down there I picked up a fungal parasite called Histoplasmosis that, over a decade, migrated to my eyes and slowly caused blindness. I’ve been totally blind for about a year now, so I’m pretty new to it.
When I first went blind, I barely left the house and was afraid to go in public. I felt like everyone was staring at me and in all honesty, I barely knew what I was doing. The transition had been difficult and I didn’t have any support group to teach me. One day my husband asks if I can take an Uber down to the bank and deposit a rent check and I reluctantly agree.
While out, he messages again and reminds me that we’re out of a few crucial groceries. There was a Wal-Mart grocery literally across the street from the bank, so I figure everything in life is an experience and I’ll have to learn how to shop alone eventually, so why not. Everything was fine at first and I was only grabbing a few things so I didn’t need a cart.
I was using my cane and what little echolocation skills I had at the time to get around, but was still bumping into things as we blind tend to do sometimes. My cane suddenly hit something a bit softer and I figure maybe I had whacked someone’s leg and apologize. Cue Entitled Kid (EK) and Entitled Mother (EM). Me: Shoot, I’m sorry—
EM: Hey! You just hit my son!! Me: I’m so sorry, ma’am, I didn’t see him there. EM begins yelling: HOW COULD YOU NOT SEE HIM, HE’S CLEARLY RIGHT HERE!! Now, again, I’m fully blind, but I don’t wear sunglasses. Mostly because I can’t afford a good UV blocking pair, but also I’m not ever looking for pity or to ”play the part” of a generic blind person.
I just want to be treated like a normal person, but I do understand her confusion as blindness is a spectrum, so I try to calmly explain. Me: Ma’am, I’m blind, I can’t see anything, let alone your son. That’s why I have to use the cane, so I can get around without— She cuts me off: If you’re blind, why aren’t you wearing big sunglasses?
As a blind person, I get a lot of stupid questions, but I understand a lot of them are just people who don’t know better, so I try to happily answer as many as I can. Me: Those are really expensive (around $200 for a good pair), and I really don’t need any inside. Here is where my blood starts to boil. EM: You’re not blind, you’re faking it!
I can’t think of any reason someone would want to pretend to be blind, and nothing makes me angrier more than when someone calls me a liar when I’m not. Just as I’m about to respond, I feel a tug and before I blink, I realize this little demon spawn has snatched my $100 cane from my hands. For those of you who don’t understand, that’s like if you’re shopping and suddenly the power goes out and you can’t see a single light.
Without my cane, I can barely move at all without crashing into anything. My voice gets shaky as I begin to panic: Please give that back! I REALLY DO NEED IT!! EM: No you don’t, you liar. My son deserves to play with this more than you! I hear her shuffle away and my expensive cane cracking into metal displays and such as they leave.
I start crying and waving my arms in front of me to grab onto something, anything, and end up crashing and falling into a center aisle display, making a loud scene. I somewhat curl into a ball and cry. I’m alone in public, in the dark, and I had no idea what to do. Suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulder and a man’s voice. We’ll call him AG for awesome guy.
He asks if I’m okay and to stay right here. I do, but begin to at least sit up and listen. This man must have been tall and built like a tank because his footsteps sounded like a giant and I felt a suction of wind when he took off. Maybe about 30 or 40 feet away, I hear this loud bellowing like an angry lion and a loud crash, then before I know it the man is back and helping me to my feet.
He takes my hand and puts my cane into my palm and helps me pick up the items I dropped when I fell into the display. Me wiping tears from my cheeks: Thank you, thank you so much, I didn’t know how to handle that. AG: Don’t worry about it, some people are just monsters. This guy restored my faith in humanity and even helped me finish shopping and helped me out of the store.
As we’re leaving, I can hear the familiar screeching of EM, something about AG grabbing the cane and pulling hard, flinging her little devil child into a shopping cart. I don’t know if she was exaggerating or not but it would explain the crash I heard. It’s easy to feel alone in a world without sight, but even through the sheer terror of being stripped of my cane, at least I know now that there are people willing to stand up for me when I need it.