How Blind People Dress

It was a typical Saturday nearly a year ago.   I sat on the bus cruising down Atlantic towards Bixby Knolls.   It was a five minute walk to the first stop, followed by a fifteen minute wait, then a fifteen minute bus ride, with at another stop, and finally a twenty minute bus ride to my final stop.   It was about an hour journey to go what in a car took about fifteen minutes.   In the extra 45 minutes of donated time to my weekly trip to improve class, I learned something new about me; I didn’t dress like a blind person.

How does a blind person dress?   It was a stunning realization at age 31.   I had spent 25 years as a blind person, diagnosed with RP and declared legally blind at age six.  For 25 years I learned a great deal about being blind.   A majority of my lessons was how to adapt a sighted world that I inhabited to my vision loss, so that I could overcome my blindness by self-acceptance through modification.   In those classes on braille, mobility lessons to use the white cane, training on technology that allowed me to more easily access tools for education and employment, and other skill based learning activities there was one lesson missing; how to dress for the blind.   That Saturday morning I learned how the blind were supposed to be dressed by a middle-age woman with hoop gold earrings and a top two-sizes too small.

Sitting in the front row of the overcrowded bus a loud voice called out to the beat of snapping fingers, ”Hey you, you blind?”   I was slightly taken back.   Her question felt more like an accusations.  I could feel the burning shine of an interrogation lamp as if she was the hard detective ready to pounce on me.  “Yes…yes I am,” I winced, waiting for what would come next.

“Really?   Girl you don’t look blind.   You go to be playing,” her accusations continued.   Sitting there, I thought do I need to prove myself?   Do I offer to take an eye exam?   Could you imagine she suddenly pulled out an eye chart to administer an eye test to prove me legit?   “You are all coordinated and shit.   Your clothes match and your hair is done.”   With that statement it all came clear to these less-than-20/20 eyes.   In her eyes individuals with visual impairments cannot dress.   I stuck out to her, not because of the white cane, my constant companion, but because I didn’t look the way she thought a blind person should look.

She imagined the blind with clashing colors; perhaps, poke-a-dot pink pants with green stripped top, and lop sided ponytail.   A blind woman with perfectly straightened hair, blue jeans, pink sparkle top, white cardigan, matching jewelry, and matching sandals.   In nobody’s book I would be the fashion-forward diva, but in her world my ability to simply match my clothing and comb my hair severely broke her conception of the blind that it caused her to question my authenticity as a blind person.

I sat back on the bus looking around at everyone else’s clothing wondering about my own perceptions.   Did I assume she was low class, because of her two-sizes-too-small top and oversized hoop earrings?   Did I assume the young man with baggy jeans matches with a black tank top was a thug?   Was the woman wearing a heavy coat over skinny jeans with sunken eyes a drug addict?   Could that man dressed in khakis and polo shirt be a member of the young Republicans?   Did I assume much about their lives and who they were based on their dress?  

How we dress is often a costume, telling the world a story about us.   Think about Halloween and the costumes we wear; princess, cowboy, rapper, punk rocker, hobo….etc.   These customs inform others who we are and not just on Halloween, but each day.   Every time I sit on the bus I gaze around looking at the other passengers wondering who they are and where they are going.   I draft storylines in my head.   All of this is based on how they look and what this world has told me how/what people that look like that should be.  

It’s always refreshing to have those pre-conceived notions shatters, the truth rock breaking through the deluded stain glass window of perception.   Perhaps, that guy in baggy jeans with matching black tank top was a young do-gooder on his way to volunteer at the Homeless shelter, that “drug addict” woman was a teacher merely wrapped up with sunken eyes due to a nasty cold, the polo shirt guy was a drug dealer, and the woman in that two-sizes-too-small shirt was a well-to-do business woman that simply enjoyed rockin’ her body to the world.   They could be exactly what I thought and what I thought they could not be.

That day on the bus I not only learned how blind people are supposed to dress like but I saw the truth behind how we see others.   Each of us have images in our heads of how certain types of people should look.   Sometimes those images are true, but 90 percent of the time if we truly open ourselves up to difference in our perceptions of those that are different from us we may clear our own vision.   I applaud that woman for owning her perceptions and bravely exposing them.   That day she taught me how this blind girl's vision can be obstructed by perception.