Take Up Space
“You deserve to take up space, just like everyone else.”
I heard this said on a podcast that I was listening to the other day. The podcast is called Be My Eyes. It is produced by the folks behind the Be My Eyes app. This app is used to connect the blind with volunteers who provide all types of assistance such as reading labels, giving directions, and all manner of other tasks. In this particular episode, a number of blind and visually-impaired people were asked about how they shop for groceries. One of the people interviewed mentioned that she often felt shame when asking for help, from employees at the store. Her husband told her the above quote. She said that he was telling her “that it’s okay to ask the store employees for help because that is what they are there for. That everyone asks the employees for help from time to time and they do not feel bad about it, so neither should you, just because you need a bit more sometimes.”
This really resonated with me and made me think about how often shame, is tied to disability.
This shame is often tied to pride, as in, we do not want to be seen as less than others who are not disabled. However, the shame also comes from how we are treated by others, who do not have a disability. There is a real lack of awareness and understanding that we really just want to be seen as people, not as people that are broken in some way. Do we need assistance sometimes? Yes, we do. But so does just about everyone else at one time or another. In fact, as America ages, more and more people are going to need more help than “normal” people.
We live in a world that just, is not very friendly to those of us with blindness or other disabilities. The vast majority of people have probably never known someone that is blind or had the opportunity to interact with them. It is not that we don’t exist in large numbers. In fact, research shows that there are at least 1.5 million Americans who are blind or severely visually impaired. However, 90% of them do not use a cane or guide dog to get around in public. This means, they are relying solely upon a person to guide them, or more likely, they are not leaving the house very often at all.
We need to get out of the house and experience life outside of those four walls. We need to start adding things back to our lives like hobbies and experiences rather than continuing to strip more and more things away due to our fear and a misplaced sense of shame.
We can do better. We deserve better. We deserve to take up space, just like everyone else.
