A few years ago, I was sitting at my grandmother’s house with my cousins. It was one of those ordinary family days where everyone drifts in and out of the kitchen, talking over each other, eating things before they are properly finished, and generally behaving as though time is more of a suggestion than a rule.
One of my cousins had brought his girlfriend along. At some point, she ended up in the kitchen helping my grandmother cook. I cannot remember exactly what she was making, but I do remember what she said afterwards.
She told us she did not really like volunteering in the kitchen. Not because she could not cook and not because she did not want to help, but because my grandmother would sometimes give her a look when she did things differently.
You know the one. That side-eye Caribbean parents and grandparents seem to inherit at birth. Not anger. Not correction. Just that expression that says, “Well... that is certainly a way to do it.”
Everyone laughed, including my grandmother.
The thing is, my cousin’s girlfriend was not doing anything wrong. She was just doing it differently, and somehow that stuck with me.
Different and wrong are not the same thing. Most of us know that. We say it all the time. In practice, however, we seem to struggle with the distinction.
More often than not, people mistake familiarity for correctness. Something works for them, so it quietly becomes the way things should be done. Not necessarily because they are arrogant or controlling. Most of the time, they do not even realise they are doing it.
It happens in families, workplaces, friendships, and just about every other space where human beings gather long enough to develop opinions. The blind and visually impaired community is no exception.
I have lost count of the number of times I have listened to blind people describe how they accomplish the same task and wondered whether they were even talking about the same activity.
One person uses a particular screen reader command. Another person has a completely different method. One person organises their phone one way. Someone else does the exact opposite. One traveller memorises every landmark along a route, while another prefers a different approach entirely.
None of that is remarkable. Human beings have been finding different ways to accomplish the same goal since the beginning of time. What is remarkable is how quickly a conversation about methods can become a conversation about competence.
Somewhere along the way, “This is how I do it” quietly becomes “This is how it should be done.” Once that happens, somebody inevitably ends up defending themselves. Not because they failed or because their method does not work, but simply because it does not look familiar to the person judging it.
The irony is that blind and visually impaired people know better than most that there is rarely only one way to accomplish something. Many of us spend our lives adapting to technology, environments, techniques and expectations. Sometimes we even adapt to things that were supposedly designed for us in the first place.
Yet, even with all of that experience, we are not immune to falling into the same trap as everyone else. We still compare. We still measure. We still occasionally look at somebody else’s approach and think, “Why are they doing it like that?”
Most blind and visually impaired people have spent years proving themselves in one way or another. Proving they can study, work, travel independently, manage a household, raise children, hold down jobs, or simply move through the world without somebody deciding to turn their existence into a group discussion.
After a while, the proving becomes so routine that you barely notice you are doing it.
Then somebody questions your method. Or compares it to their own. Or casually mentions how much easier they find the same task. Suddenly, you find yourself defending a decision you were perfectly comfortable with five minutes earlier.
I know most people don’t intend to create that pressure. In fact, many of these conversations come from a genuine desire to help. Advice matters, and so does shared experience. Many of us learned what we know because somebody else took the time to share it.
The trouble, however, begins when personal experience gets promoted to universal truth. When “this works for me” quietly becomes “this is the right way.”
That is the same thing I saw in my grandmother’s kitchen all those years ago. A perfectly reasonable way of doing something being measured against an invisible standard. Not because it was wrong. Simply because it was different.
Once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. We do it with parenting, education, careers, disability and countless other parts of life. We take what is familiar to us and quietly promote it to the standard everyone else is expected to meet.
Maybe that is where the weight really comes from. Not from being blind, not from learning new skills, and not even from overcoming barriers. Maybe the weight comes from constantly having to justify things that never should have required a defence in the first place.
This column is supplied in conjunction with the T&T Blind Welfare Association
Headquarters: 118 Duke Street, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad
Email: ttbwa1914@gmail.com
Phone: (868) 624-4675
WhatsApp: (868) 395-3086
