Three benefits of living with a disability (featuring @nextgen622 as author)

Is this a typo? Benefits? You ask. How could there be any possible benefit from having a disability?

Well, in fact there are. And here are three unexpected benefits I have personally experienced in my own journey living with a degenerating eye condition.

Improved lateral thinking and innovation

Growing up with a vision impairment meant that there were often things that most people took for granted, but which I struggled to do. To do the same things, I needed to come up with creative solutions and alternative ways of doing things. So from a very young age, I learnt to think laterally and developed my problem solving skills. Most people are so use to perceiving the world in a certain way, but when you are stripped of one of your senses, you learn to perceive things in a different way.

When I was still living by myself a few years ago, I had the annoying task of having to cook for myself each night. The challenge I faced in the kitchen was not been able to read the labels on various bottles and containers. As a result, I couldn't tell which container was the salt and which one was the sugar, and all the packaging for the herbs looked the same. So how did I manage? Instead of using sight, I used my sense of smell to distinguish between the herbs, and for some ingredients where I couldn't use the sense of smell, I used different containers and labels to help me identify all the different ingredients.

And this leads on to the second benefit.

Improved memory

People who know me well often comment on my ability to remember things. In fact, I've noticed this in many other people I know who also have a vision impairment. I think this is due to the fact that for someone with a vision impairment to thrive in a sighted world, we often need to make extra effort to adapt to our circumstances.

For example, I remember when I was still in university, I had to do many presentations. For most people, they could refer to speech notes as they are presenting. However, for me, this was not possible, as I couldn't read speech notes no matter how big the font was. Furthermore, as I have some sight, I never needed to learn braille, which meant I couldn't refer to braille notes either. As a side note, this is why the title of my memoir which I've been posting on Steemit is "Living in Between Two Worlds", because I have often found myself being caught between the world of the sighted and the world of the blind, and also between the identity of being Chinese but not fully Chinese, and being Australian but not fully Australian. As a result, every time I had to do a presentation, I would always remember the entire speech. Over time, this has become second nature to me. I have learnt how to force things into my memory, and be innovative when I need to.

Resilience

Growing up with a vision impairment, I experienced a lot of bullying at school and a lot of hurtful comments and actions from people, sometimes done knowingly and sometimes unknowingly. Sometimes this comes in the form of a patronising comment, and sometimes from a look or stare. The interesting thing with people staring and giving me strange looks is that I can often notice people are doing it to me because I have some peripheral vision, however people generally can't tell I'm looking back at them because it doesn't seem like I'm looking at them. Most of the time however, those hurtful words and actions are done out of ignorance and a lack of understanding, rather then out of malice.

But from all these things I've experienced, it has made me a stronger and more resilient person.

As a result, whatever unforeseen things I may experience in life, there's not much that can knock me out completely. I have developed the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and stay optimistic, because as they say:

What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.

So I'm thankful to God for the person I have become today. Disability isn't all bad. Without what I have gone through with my vision impairment, I wouldn't be the person I am today, and for these reasons, I am thankful.

To read more about my story, you can read my short memoir series. You can find Part 1 here.

You can also follow me on @nextgen622