accepting Help

By golly Ron, I do believe that you've been rehabbed! 

Either that, or in a previous life you were a Rehabilitation Teacher. 

Very well put, and thank Heaven I'm not your type, because I'd just break your heart when I had to tell you that Cathy would not allow me out. 

By the way, over the years I rode the Ferry from Bainbridge Island across Puget Sound to Seattle, and most trips someone would walk up alongside me and ask if I needed assistance exiting the boat.  I'd made the trip alone so often that I probably could have shown them the way, but if the voice was that of a charming young woman, and as I grew older this was most women, I would always accept.  But usually if it were some guy, I'd just thank him and wait for the pretty lady. 

I became well acquainted with many commuters.  Bainbridge Island is teaming with aspiring young attorneys of both sexes, all of the women seemed to be extremely gorgeous.  Hmm...maybe blindness is a Blessing after all. 

But moving off the subject of lovely helpers, I want to salute you, Ron.  You have learned the great Rehab Secret.  Rehabilitation is an internal, very personal activity. 

We can think about it forever, but it is not an intellectual change, it is deep down in our gut.  It's that day when you rise up and say, "By golly, I am just as fine a fellow(woman) as everyone else". 

I remember getting the attention of some of my despondent students in the training center by sitting them down in my office and beginning by saying, "I believe that I am every bit as good as you."  I would go on to say that rehabilitation was an internal affair.  We, the staff and the agency, provided some guidance along the road and a place to work on the challenge, but the hard work would be theirs and theirs alone. 

Some made the trip successfully and some took the road back home.  And I never knew who would be successful. 

We had a young man who breathed smoke and brimstone and pawed the earth as he snarled out his hatred for our rules and our superior attitudes.  He stormed out after about two months in the program. 

Several years passed and one day I heard someone asking my secretary if I was in.  I came to the door of my office and beheld this young man who had stormed away in such anger. 

"I just wanted to come in and thank you for what you did for me", he smiled.  "I don't know how you tolerated me when I was here, but after I left I did some serious thinking.  I'm graduating this year with my degree in business administration, and I already have an offer of a job in Portland."  (this was back in the days when folks could graduate and get a job).

He went on for many embarrassing minutes, telling everyone who passed the open door just how I'd opened his eyes, etc.  I just stood there with my big mouth hanging open. 

 

Curious Carl

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Ron Brooks

To: acb-l@acb.org

Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 3:26 AM

Subject: [acb-l] Accepting Help

Good Morning All,

 

I think this is one of the hardest things about being blind. On the one hand, help generally helps a lot. On the other, it's often given for some combination of at least two reasons: 1) the person genuinely wants to do something nice for me; and/or 2) the person doesn't think I can do it for myself. As a person with a fairly developed independence streak, an overdeveloped ego and a competitive nature, it chaffs me to think that people might not see me as capable, but it's also annoying that deep down, their help usually makes things (often very simple things) much easier to do.

 

When I was a younger man, I viewed unsolicited offers of help as unwanted intrusions, and I took every opportunity to try and prove my own independence. I felt like accepting help or an offered seat on the train or advice when crossing a street would not only be demeaning to me but would set the blindness movement back decades. I felt I always had an obligation to be capable, independent and a powerful example of what we as blind people can do and what society should allow us to do. Not only that, but I very harshly judged those who did not share my commitment to independence.

 

As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that whereas I can do many things independently (if a little more slowly or less gracefully), my real down deep reason for refusing help and for judging harshly those who accepted it was insecurity and embarrassment. It's true that if I am totally incapable of taking care of my own business will send a bad message to the people I encounter, and it's true that if a large number of us demonstrate the same lack of capability day in and day out, there will accumulate, over time, a societal belief in our inability to live independently. However, I could not really deal with this issue of unsolicited and often unwanted help until I understood the real reasons I didn't want it. Honestly, my reluctance to accept help probably was motivated, at least in small part, by my desire to move society's dial on the perceptions of blind people as capable and worthy of equality, but most of it was not about society; rather, it was about me and my issues.

 

Now that I'm older, I still think that we need to be independent and capable, and there are times when it's in our best interest to turn down help. I also think that as a community of blind people, we need to help each other by setting good examples of what we can do, and we need to hold ourselves and each other accountable for not doing our best. After all, while we may not individually know each other's individual abilities and limitations, we all know what being blind is like, and we can generally know what the average blind person can and should be able to do with proper training, support and a community that generally sets a good example, and we should use this knowledge to inform the way we help, support and hold each other accountable.

 

As for accepting help, I personally do not think we should merely accept it so that someone else later might benefit. Actually, I think that unless you have absolutely no personal ego at all, telling yourself that accepting help is done for some other person, is about as self-deceptive as me thinking that turning down help was for the good of everyone else who would come after. … I accept help when it's offered and when I think it will be easier and simpler than turning it down. I turn down help when I truly don't want it or when I don't feel good about the person offering it. In other words, when the nice young woman with the pretty sounding voice offered to walk with me through New York's Penn Station yesterday because we were on the same train, I gladly accepted, and when she suggested we grab a cup of coffee at Starbucks while waiting, I gladly accepted her offer and felt like I had finally won the "help the blind guy" lottery. Had she been an older guy instead of a young pretty-sounding woman, I might have turned her down—sorry Carl, you're not my type. On the other hand, if I thought the old guy would have been the only way for me to find my train, I would have probably have accepted in any case.

 

To conclude, I think we can do both. We can come across as capable and confident. We can go to school, become well read, participate in society, get jobs, raise families, take the train, write books, be thought leaders, and we can simultaneously accept help when it's offered and/or when it's needed. While the individual giving the help may or may not see us as capable, our collective contributions to the bigger picture will not go unnoticed, and if we're all participating and contributing in meaningful ways, we will not feel so personally affronted when we can't be super blinks in any given moment. BTW, the woman who helped me was an attorney going from her home in the City to a meeting on Long Island. I don't know what she thought when she met me, but by the end, she knew that I lived in Phoenix, was traveling for business, had taken the Acela Express up from DC that morning and had no idea of how to get from that train to the Long Island Railroad. Oh yeah, and since I was dressed in business attire, had a clean and well-mannered dog guide (thankfully Potter was behaving himself), I'm sure she didn't walk away thinking I was an incapable boob. Rather, she got to do her good deed, and I got to have coffee with someone who was not only pretty-sounding, but also helpful, smart and interesting.

 

I should probably acknowledge that I sound like an opportunist here. I'm really not all that bad. All kidding aside, I have actually met many people through them offering me help, which I may or may not have needed, but which I accepted for one reason or another, and in a number of cases, I've gotten the chance to make a bigger and more positive impression through our conversation and my overall demeanor, and yes, I've enjoyed those encounters—even if they may have begun in a less than desirable way.

 

I will conclude with one more comment. I often hear the same people complain about unsolicited help and then turn right around and make personal lifestyle choices that leave them vulnerable to the help they so adamantly reject. I'm talking about the person who would rather use paratransit than taking the time to learn their neighborhood and the transit routes that serve it; or the person who depends on sighted people to read their mail rather than figuring out how to scan and read it on their own; or the person who will accept a free ride from a neighbor to the store and then get annoyed when that same neighbor doesn't invite them to dinner because they figure the neighbor doesn't see them as an equal. … I'm not opening this up to take shots at anyone who makes these choices; we all have the right to do what works for us. However, if we want to be treated independently and with dignity, we need to start by treating ourselves that way. It means looking within ourselves for solutions before expecting society to offer the answer. It means doing everything within our power first and then accepting help when we truly need or can benefit from it. I actually think that if one truly does their best, accepting help becomes easier because once you've truly done your best to do what you can on your own, then you're not trying to convince yourself that the only reason you're accepting help is for someone else's good. Rather, you're accepting it because you know, in your heart of hearts, that you've done all you can, and you truly need it, or else, like me with the pretty commuter, you're accepting it because you decide you want it. In other words, we will help ourselves much more by doing our best first and then allowing other people to help us when their help is truly needed or truly wanted, and frankly, if we feel better about ourselves, then we will feel less threatened by what others think. … I think this is a hard thing, and I suspect not all will agree with me, and that's okay. But I do think we all have to ask ourselves these key questions: Have I done all I can do? Have I done all I want to do? If we can answer either or both of these as "yes," then we should relax and take the help that's offered and be grateful it's there. If our answers are "no", then we should have no qualms about turning help down—politely, of course. Either way, by taking charge of how we approach independence, we will be better able to deal with external offers of help, and we will avoid being victimized by the good intentions of others.

 

Ron Brooks

Phoenix, AZ

ronlbrooks@cox.net

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