My life as a visually impaired, pole dancing, psychology student.

An introduction
Hey everyone! My name is Rosalie and as my title implies, I am visually impaired, I do pole dancing and I study psychology. But of course there is more about me than ‘just’ those things. So, I’d like to introduce myself to you and tell you a little bit more about who I am and what I do.  

I am Dutch and I live happily in the Netherlands (I can get anywhere on my bicycle so that’s handy). I am 24 years old and I live in a house with four other students. One of them, @thebatchman, has made me very enthusiastic to also go blogging on Steem it! Furthermore, I studied social work and after that I went on studying to get my master’s degree for the master Healthpsychology and Technology. This master is about designing psychologically substantiated health promoting interventions for a specific target group. For example, designing an application that uses tracking devices to get employees with sedentary behavior motivated to be more physically active at home or the office in order to be healthier.

Visual impairment
So, about my visual impairment. I have a disease called ‘Stargardt’s disease’ which is a type of macular degeneration (which originally is a disease that elderly get). My eyesight was always normal until my vision started to fade away when I was about 10 years old. At age 14 I was officially diagnosed. There is more to the story than going to the hospital a few times to get diagnosed, so I will write another blog just about how that journey went, since this is an introduction. In short, due to my visual impairment I lost my central vision. That means that I can only see peripherally. The photo below (from google) can give you an idea of how the world looks like through my eyes (although I cannot remember anymore what it is like to have a normal eyesight). Even in my dreams I am visually impaired). If I want to see something, I have to scan my view (mostly looking to the upper right of left) to create a more ‘complete’ view of what I am seeing. When talking to people (in particular strangers) this causes for certain awkward/funny moments because they often think that I am talking to someone behind them. This does not, however, stop me from talking to other people. But you can imagine that this is not always funny for me haha. The eye care professionals estimate my vision at about 5%. But I believe that it is just a number, it depends a lot on what you do with it. Which I am hoping to tell you about in my blogs. 

Pole dancing
Enough for now about my vision, let me tell you something about pole dancing! Till the age of 15 I always did gymnastics. After that I did rhythmic gymnastics and kickboxing. You can probably imagine that these last 2 sports were not really all that handy for me due to my eyesight since I had to catch clubs, balls, robes, hoops, ribbons and be careful not to get hit and kicked that hard while kickboxing. So I decided to quit and to go to the gym. Well, after 2 years I got bored and wanted to try something different. I found a pole dance studio nearby and after my first lesson I was sold! I am pole dancing for 5 years now and a year ago I was asked to be a pole dance instructor, which I happily said yes to. Luckily, my vision loss is no problem at all. I have to break it to you, I am not that kind of pole dancer that wears extreme high heels and dances in a bikini or less. Although, you do need skin to be able to stick to the pole.  But who knows, the pole wear industry has created sticky leggings to be able to pole dance in. I have not tried it yet but who knows, maybe in a few years, we are all pole dancing in sticky morph suits! So, what do I wear than? Well, just decent shorts, a sports bra and no shoes. There is still this big taboo on pole dancing. People think that pole dancers only wear high heels and wear sexy clothing to hump against that pole instead of doing athletic and elegant moves in the pole itself. In later blogs I’d like to tell you more about how I experience this taboo because sometimes I am afraid of keeping the taboo maintained, while other times, I feel like I have to do something about it but am I willing to (possibly?) risk my career as a psychologist by showing the world my pole dance skills? 

This was my introduction, I hope I could interest you a bit. In later blogs I will go into more depth about the above named themes. And yes, you might see some of my awesome pole tricks if I think they are decent enough for strangers to see haha. At last, I will also tell you about my experiences in daily life being visually impaired at my age.