Blind Alley is back
Like you've never seen before.
Hi, I’m Will. I’m a writer and producer from California. My writing has appeared in places like NPR, New Yorker and The New York Times. This is a newsletter about what it’s like to be blind.
In my work at Be My Eyes, I spend all day thinking and talking about blindness, visual impairment and all its fascinating aspects. I’m also passionate about helping people conquer their fear of vision impairment. This newsletter will include personal stories, some analysis and some commentary, which will hopefully not only pull back the curtain on a much-stigmatized minority, but reveal something profound to help you in your own life.
Moving Blind Alley from TinyLetter to Substack means we’re trying on a new model and I’ve got some cool ideas for how it’ll work. At a free level, you’ll get a new version of the Blind Alley you know and love: semi-regular updates from me with newsworthy items and interesting tidbits that I’m thinking about. If you subscribe at a paid level, you’ll get a few additional writings (the really juicy stuff!) – but more importantly, you’ll get invited to exclusive events and opportunities that are for you and you only: namely, a monthly “board meeting” where we’ll gather as a group to debrief, scheme and get spirited on some of the issues facing our community today.
There are 2.2 billion people in the world living with some vision impairment. Please forward this to someone you know who could use a boost, and help us continue to build a community like we’ve never seen before.
The Long Version
When I realized I was legally blind about 12 years ago, I didn’t know any other “blind people.” I didn’t want to. Nor did I feel particularly comfortable sharing my experiences with friends and family. Becoming blind was my own personal trip.
It was a different world, too. There were no talking iPhones, no AI apps, no Uber, no Be My Eyes. There were no blind YouTubers or public figures except for Stevie Wonder and Helen Keller. The average blind person had no community of peers.
This was the environment in which I started Blind Alley back in 2013. I was a broke freelancer living in a ramshackle little cottage in North Oakland, and, looking back on the 17 editions I sent out over a period of a few years, I cringe and beam at the same time. Cringing and smiling, over what I didn’t yet know, what I was bold enough to share, what has changed so much, and what hasn’t changed at all.
Reading your own journal is a self-indulgent exercise, but it can also be a time to take heart. The guy who started writing ‘Blind Alley’ back in 2013 was doing it out of frustration, fear, feelings of displacement and disenchantment with their young life. That’s not the place I’m in anymore.
So, why continue writing ‘Blind Alley’? Not for the exact same reasons I did seven years ago. In the spirit of newsworthiness, I’ve broken it down into a few main reasons. If you’re sharing the newsletter or are considering subscribing, let it be a tactical map for our upcoming mission here.
1. We need each other.
This is one of those statements that sounds quaint on its surface, but for all its kumbaya effect its also about subversion, rebellion and bucking a system which has its thumb very firmly pressed down upon us. Much like other groups, we’ve been systemically dismantled, disenfranchised, taught to hate our selves and taught to hate each other. That needs to end, and it will. When it does I hope to be part of it.
Some historical context: Gathering and meeting other blind people was always fraught, both logistically and politically. Obviously blind people don’t drive, sometimes they don’t have the resources to travel independently; many of them are at or below the poverty line. Prior to the internet, blind people only met each other at blind schools (which only represented a tiny sliver of the totally “visually impaired” population) or through membership organizations. There’s a rich history of telephonic and radio communication between blind folks which is definitely worth some words at another time, but in general blind people were mostly stuck with whatever lot in life they happened to be born into. And with that came all the stereotypes, assumptions and misguided approaches that their (mostly sighted) community would levy.
Prior to the internet, our only chance to escape that oppression and monotony was, unsurprisingly, stymied by politics. If you were determined enough, and saved up some money, you could gather with your fellow blind countrymen once a year at one of two national conventions. But this meant you had to take a side. Because how could it be a great American organizing story if there weren’t arch-rivals – in this case, in the form of two blindness membership organizations known as the NFB and the ACB.
I’ll spill more ink on the ACB v. NFB later – I promise. It’s too juicy not to, and a subscription newsletter is the absolute perfect venue for that. For the record I have not and will not pick a side. In my view, in-fighting comes naturally with the spoils of establishment; and with an unemployment rate of 70%, I don’t think we’re anywhere near established enough yet to have that luxury.
What it means for you: If you are blind, know someone who is struggling with vision loss, or work in a field that touches issues of sight or lack thereof, please subscribe. If you can’t afford a full subscription and would like to upgrade your subscription to get access to our monthly “board meetings,” email me and we will work it out. It’s more important to me that people who desperately need this information get access than living life in a business model.
2. There’s tons of news to share.
When I arrived in the blindness world, even the most savvy and literate of our class were still kicking it old school; usually with a heavy backpack full of clunky reading devices, GPS navigators, and thick braille books covered in dog treat dust. Today much of our previous headaches have been somewhat and in some cases completely solved by the dawn of the iPhone and Apple’s pivot toward mainstream accessibility.
Web 2.0 hasn’t lifted anyone up more than the blind community. I’m not going to list the ways, because literally every day there’s a new news clipping about some cool thing to help the blind, and the one thing we’re not lacking is blind tech podcasts and blogs which can tell you all about it (I’ll be linking to plenty of those regularly in upcoming editions of the newsletter, as well).
But even though I spend all day every day at work thinking about blindness and issues pertaining to us, there’s still more than I can fit into my daily output at Be My Eyes. There are stories that don’t fit anywhere, it seems. They are human, they are vexing, they often don’t settle the stomach or feed the soul. They just pop up, make you scratch your head and in some cases, kind of turn your worldview inside out. Those are the stories I want to share here at Blind Alley.
What it means for you: I hope this can be a go-to source for blindness news, commentary on what’s going on in our world, and some extrapolation to figure out what it means on a broader scale. Which leads me to my next mission statement…
3. You might go blind.
Vision loss matters to everyone; This isn’t a bold claim. I could use words like “intersectional” or “spectrum” or "universal” but it only cheapens the point. If you live long enough, you’ll lose some or all of yoru sight. That’s just fact. And the further we get into our lives, the more you’ll look around and see peoples eyes failing them. Right now the World Health Organization says there’s 2.2 billion people living with impaired vision. That is a stupidly huge number. You realize that’s 30 percent of the world, right?
What it means for you: Even if you’re not blind, I guarantee every single issue will have applicability or at least correlate to your experience. Blindness is shame, blindness is feeling inadequate, blindness is uniqueness, it’s pride, it’s joy, it’s dark humor, it’s progressivism, it’s conservatism. It’s a bizarre, disorientating gut-punch that forces out our most deep and basic of human reactions and it’s hilarious to think that every time you see a blind person walking down the street you look upon them and silently assume, with pity, that their experience is so different from your own.
Read up
A lot has happened since I stopped sending out Blind Alley five or so years ago, and there are many of you who probably subscribed later on such that you never even got one issue. If you’re ravenous enough to start reading right now, I’d encourage you to follow this path:
Start with my essay in the New York Times. It sort of sets up my entry point into blindness and was the domino that started all of what I’m working on today.
Read some of the eight essays I edited for a series called Interpoint. This shows a bunch of blind perspectives in some cases very different from my own, but rigorously edited to try and help them make their arguments with clarity and impact.
Listen to the podcasts published by my current company, Be My Eyes. This is where I get to go deep with blind people and those who are designing the accessible world about what makes them tick and why or how they do what they do.
If that’s not enough homework, email me and tell me what you’re looking for. Blindness is full of fascinating discoveries and if you’ve been hanging around me long enough you know my motto about the Narnia-like process of stumbling upon this community and all it has to offer: Small door; big world.