Hello to all my beautiful nerds traveling the vast universe I am back with another past and it’s a bit of a response post!

Your Life Is Not Over When You Lose Your Sight!

I was inspired by Derek Daniel from Life after Sight Loss which is an awesome podcast by a blind person who lives life after sight loss and gives tips how to get through it and one of his videos was about life not being over after sight loss and wanted to do my own response about it.

I felt like responding to this now because I was in a Facebook Live Chat earlier and I felt like I needed to get some of the negative aspects off because as a person who has lost her sight at 23 I had so many life changes during that time and yes I was one of those who thought my life was going to end because I’m blind, even when I tried finding a job at 28 after graduating from college that I couldn’t find anything but knowing about this podcast did make me think more in a positive light and feel like doing my response now.

Actually, the video I’m referring to is that Sight Loss is a Tragedy but Being Blind Isn’t and I agree with the title since he does give good points.

Why is losing sight a tragedy but not blindness? Derek said that going blind is a tragic event while being blind is just the journey because yes we can lose our sight in many ways whether it being all of a sudden, having Glaucoma, having my eye condition, or even losing your sight due to an accident it can happen in different ways. While blindness, it is just the journey you have to take in order to live your life the way you want it to be. Yes it can be hard, trust me I went through that while losing my sight and going through college but I was able to learn different techniques of doing things like sewing, writing, and using different technology such as my IPhone and now going to work teaching Assistive Technology is something that came from my decision of switching my job goal gears years ago. While with the tragic experience of losing sight loss is depending on how the event affects the person since it is surrounded by sight loss. It depends how someone feels when they lose it and it can take a jolt, as in, “Holy moly, what just happened!?” And then things start to take shape.

What I noticed in the Facebook chat we were talking about how different people who may be performers or even YouTubers that are going through their own visual impairments have to go through a lot like trying to live life daily and how not getting enough in Super Chat from YouTube is not fair to the person because they’re blind. Yes, blindness can be the factor but to me it’s how you handle it in order to get around it. One good example if you saw my interview with Apl DeAp at the NFB National Convention, one of my questions was asking how is he able to perform on different stages? He did explain that he has to be more careful in what he does onstage performing whether it’s jumping around or doing break dances for example. Heck, I remembered when I entered one of the costume contests at a convention and they helped me with the stage before the event. Still, even if you’re visually impaired as a performer there are other ways of performing onstage and not only that getting your music produced and of course you have crowd source ways of helping you to achieve your music goal, even Traverser did a pre-order thing with their last album to help them fund their finishing project. And what about YouTube? It goes the same way, yes it may be unfair to some that they’re not getting all the money back from their Super Chat, take me for example where the YouTube Channel for this blog got de-monetized due to the new guidelines and yes I was mad but I do have Patreon just in case to help fund stuff even though we haven’t gotten any donations but that’s okay, I still go on with my channel as much as I can by posting when I can. It’s not over and see I don’t include my blindness in this because it sucks to be blind but there are other ways of getting around the issues of not getting the funds from your video or other projects. You just have to problem solve and find different ways and keep going from there.

So in the end to make this post a bit short, going through sight loss is a tragedy because we have the emotions of going through our sight loss depending on the different circumstances but being blind is a way of getting on with life, yes you have to re-learn things such as cooking, cleaning, and even navigating around your local mall but we can’t always make it seem like a negative aspect because we’re blind. We have to not only empower ourselves to get out of bed, go and find a job, or even write a book and then that passes on to empowering others to learn about the disability itself and know how you’re able to advocate yourself in a certain environment. I mean I go to the House of Blues for shows for my friends in Traverser to support their music and show that I can rock out like a sighted person!

Well, that’s it for this post and it was kind of short. I will include the video I was referencing so you can see what I was talking about. I also suggest if you know someone who’s blind or if you’re a sighted supporter, I would suggest the Life after Sight Loss Podcast and YouTube for tips, advice, and any tech tidbits! So, that’s it and stay beautiful while traveling the universe!