Blind/Deaf Experience

The blind and deaf experience was jarring, to say the least. First of all, I never expected the experiment to be so jarring. I first experienced an unwillingness to put on the blindfold, a queasy, uneasing feeling. I was born with 500/500 vision, and never found out about glasses until I was 8 years old. By putting on the blindfold, I felt helpless, going back to the world that I used to live in.

Immediately, I noticed that I began overestimating the closeness of everything around me. Granted, this is to be expected – it’s only natural for the human mind to take the course of action that would result in the least “casualties by slowly walking into a doorframe.” My hands were constantly out, groping for something that I could build my perception of reality from, and I moved very slowly walking around. My sense of balance was slightly awry – I could no longer walk as comfortably, even without the threat of bumping into something. With this experience, admittedly, also came a brief sense of humiliation at being seen so helpless by other people – this must have larger implications on the perceptions society has on disabled persons.

I had one hand constantly tracing the wall. On instances where there was someone there, my partner would kindly direct me away from them. I realized that I required at least one hand to be constantly tracing a wall of some kind to be able to reliably move forward. Otherwise, I would be much to paranoid in taking another step forward, and instead just grope around me until I caught onto something. Surprisingly, walking down the stairs was not as large of a challenge as I thought it would be – mostly in part due to the railing right beside me, and finding solid footing below me was not that much of an issue.

Admittedly, the “deaf” portion of this experience did not work as well as it should have. Perhaps due to being blindfolded, I picked out any possible sound that could possibly help me walking along. Things were just a bit muffled as opposed to actually being silent, and this may have interfered with the full, intended experience.