Can I Touch the World?

When you’re sighted, there is so much to see. I know this sounds obvious when it’s written like this, but for many people it’s just something they take for granted. Words are everywhere. Photos are everywhere. They can see animals they’ve never interacted with by looking at pictures in books or watching shows about them on TV. They know what it’s like to stand at the top of a mountain even if they’ve never been. It’s true that a film can never capture the experience of being there in person, but it gives you a glimpse of what it could be like.

When you are blind, the world is whatever your hands can reach and ears can hear. You could walk past a tree every day and not know it is there because you’ve never hit it with your cane or bumped it with a shoulder. It is easy to pass through the world knowing little of what it contains. The only writing you get to access are the braille books that are put in your hands, for many blind people these are few and far between. A blind child may have only read a handful of books by the time a sighted child has read books, newspaper headlines, food packets, envelopes of letters that land by the door, street signs, adverts, posters, reminders stuck to the fridge, and the countless other fragments of writing that crop up all around them. It is easy to reach adulthood when blind and not know what a kangaroo looks like, or the difference between an oak and beech tree. The concept of standing atop a hill and seeing for miles is utterly alien to us, as is the sight of the horizon or glimpsing another planet from earth.

Learning to navigate the world while blind is a process that relies on mental mapping, ironic when many of us will have never been able to lay our hands on a map. It is another thing we miss, the visual representation of the world that can tell a person so much. If we are lucky, we might have had access to a tactile globe or world map in primary school which will be pulled out for geography lessons and then packed away. We never learn to read maps, the limited exposure we get makes developing this skill very difficult, and so we’re told or naturally grow to believe that it is impossible.

Some of us are fortunate enough to be surrounded by people who actively encourage us to explore, to stray from the path, to reach out a hand to see what we might find. But many of us will be discouraged from doing so. “Don’t touch.” “Stay there.” “Hands down.” We are reprimanded for doing something that looks unnatural yet is one of the few ways we have of expanding our limited world view. Other children can stand in a room and take in the space; we must move around it, discovering it piece by piece. But if we are denied the chance to do so, we grow to know only the seat where we have been placed and the rest of the room remains a mystery.

If people see us doing this, they will often jump in to help, believing that we must be lost. “Over here, the door is to your right.” We are denied the small victory of finding it ourselves, but more importantly of connecting its location with what we already know about the space we are in. Children are fearless and unconcerned with behaving in an acceptable way, but when you are always told that your way of discovering your environment is wrong or disruptive, it is easy to become an adult who does not want to push too hard, or who feels embarrassed and ashamed to do so. It is easy to choose not to explore, knowing that by doing so you will stand out and that others will believe you are lost and struggling.

I long for information. I have always been curious and desperate for knowledge. I have always asked too many questions and wanted to know too much. I want to know what people look like. I want to know every corner of every room. I want to connect the parts of the city that are familiar to me with the parts that are not, allowing the streets to expand in my mind until it is so full I think it might crack my bones. I want to know everything; all the things other people know without even having to try.

I have been buying maps. This is harder than it should be. But soon I will have three maps that I am able to touch. I wonder if I will run my fingers over them and take in everything they have to tell me. Or will I struggle, unused to learning this way. Will it take months to piece together all the parts until they make a whole? I am also looking at how to make my own tactile pictures from images on my computer by using a braille embosser. I want to learn all the little things that other people know. What does a no entry symbol look like? What does someone see when they look at the Nazca lines? What shape is my liver? Can I touch a picture of Mars? From the mundane to the intricate and majestic, I want to know it all.

I can’t know it all through images. I need people to tell me. What does it look like to watch someone skate? What do you see, every tiny motion? How do they move as they race from one end of the ice to the other? What colour is the sunset today? How do you see all of those colours? How do you paint, or draw, blending the colours together so perfectly? What is it like to look into another person’s eyes and believe you know what they are thinking?

But there is still so much I can learn through my hands. By running them over pictures or allowing them to reach out even when others might tell me to stop. I must do this. I cannot keep living knowing so little. I cannot touch the world. Not every grain of sand or drop of rain. But I can try my best to reach as much of it as possible.