ello ello, people. Wellcome back to the blog more reliably unreliable than your dad’s milk runs. In this here post I’d like to propose the many a times asked question that plagues most of us blind people, *ha’y clinton*, on the dayly. Why is it so hard to make a sighted friend?
Now, growing up I would often let my mind race between theories: Maybe it’s because of how I look. Or how I act. Or how dependent on others I seemed. But I think after many an hour of deliboration I’ve come to the verry subjective opinion that it all comes down to 1 reason.
We don’t try to integrate with them, and they don’t try to integrate with us. It’s a pretty common fact within both communities that our cultures are vastly different. The games we play, the experiences we had growing up, even the ways we use a phone/computer. All vastly different, but at the same time, surprisingly similar. Realistically, there’s nothing stopping a blind person from going out and learning the lure behind a genre of music, or a video game. Most of us abstain from the ladder, however, because where’s the fun in learning about a game you’ll never be able to play?
similarly, there’s nothing stopping a sighted person from going down a rabbithole at the bottom of which they find them selvvs on the audiogames.net forrum, or just watching a film with audio discription turned on. But in my opinion, they don’t because of this stigma within their community that it’s tabu, and it’s not part of their culture.
this all results in a big community to community divide between us and them. People go out and look for people they can relate to. This goes all the way back to early humans, who formed tribes bassed on how similar they were to each other. But anyways, when one starts to zoom in on the 2 communities and take into account the factions of the afor mentioned, like with every culture, there are going to be certain groups that are more extreme in their beliefs and commitments than others. The common opinion most of us share when meating someone who is exponentially different than you is that you should shy away from that difference. This, because of a fiew possible reasons: Maybe you don’t know how to handle the difference in question. Or maybe you don’t want to get out of your comfort zone. whatever the case may be, the sad truth is that it forms a sence of exclusionism between certain factions. Some of us blind folks are staunchly aposed to sighted people finding out about our community, and some sighted people equally so about theirs.
How do we address the problem?
As a blind person myself the coping mechanism I default to when faced with a cenario outside of my comfort zone is that I revert to 0. I don’t talk to anyone, and no one talks to me. I sit in a corner and let the world go on as if I don’t exist, which I’m quickly learning is not the way to go about things. Most people use that same thing in variation as a tactic, and if you don’t talk to them, they probably won’t talk to you for those exact reasons.
a fiew weeks ago I was tasked to help this sighted girl at my college with a computer problem she was having, which required a lot of back and forth talking. The here, have my number that followed was meant for nothing more than my being able to field any questions she had about said problem, but for whatever reason conversation started to flow and the next thing I know I’m being asked out on a date for this weekend.
Moral of the story, little chitlins, is that if we wanna make any progress what soever to close that divide between our communities, we all have to work towards proving to the other side that we’re all just humans. sure, we might not have eyes, but we can still interact and socialise with you. And just because our cultures are so different is not, in the slightest a good reason for not wanting to go up to a person and try to establish a bonding piece.