What do I call myself?

Some words wrap around me like a cloak. “Thakudu,” “kinginimuthu,” words that are only spoken by my family, words that carry no perfect meaning, only love. Then there are words that pierce my flesh like hooks. I rip them out, again and again, but they always leave pieces of themselves behind — pain, scars, memories.

I remember the word “ghost” being etched onto my skin by sharp young tongues. “A ghost is a girl with frightening eyes, eyes that make children scream and run away,” they told me. I remember the weight of the word “weird” against my skin, against my heart. “Weird” was something that you pointed fingers at, something you danced around, something you had the right to jeer at.

I cannot forget all the ways in which people called me blind — with scorn, with pity, with contempt, with the weight of a thousand assumptions about what I could not do. “Blind” was always a weapon in the hands of those who did not understand. "Blind” was a weapon that pushed me down and curtained me off from the world in an attempt to make me invisible.

“Blind” was a word that felt alien on my tongue, that left a bad taste in my mouth after it had left my lips. It was not a word that belonged to me, it belonged to them, the others who othered me.

So, I began to call myself “visually-impaired.” This word did not press against my wounded skin. It simply existed around me passively. It was clinical, medical, legal, formal. It wasn’t a word that the ignorant world could attack me with. It was a word from which I could distance myself, a word that made me feel nothing as I spoke it out loud.

But then, at Notre Dame, I came to know a community of disabled individuals. For the first time, I was no longer the only disabled student in my school, no longer the only disabled person in our apartment complex. I began to hear the sound of wheelchairs, listen to stories of otherness that were similar to mine, witness the ways in which they fought to be acknowledged. And I began to learn from them. I remember listening to a deaf lady at an Access-Able meeting. “You must not call us hearing-impaired,” she said, emphatically. “It suggests that we are defective, and we are not that. We live lives that are as full [of] meaning as yours.”

I took her words to heart. The next time I called myself “visually impaired,” it didn’t sit right. As I spoke the word out loud, my heart questioned: “Defective? Broken? Damaged?” But I was none of these things.

I searched for words that I could use to speak about my disability. “What if I called myself blind?”, I wondered. What would it mean to take this word, this weapon that had been used against me, and make it my own? What if I called myself blind, and in doing so, defied everything that the word meant to the ableist world?

So, I tried speaking the word out loud. “Blind,” I said. I did not flinch, but there was still that familiar bad taste in my mouth. I spoke the word again and again in my interactions with the world. “Blind.” A lot of times I said it mindlessly, but most times I remembered, sometimes I hurt.

I don’t know if I am fully healed from all the wounds, from all the times “blind” pierced my skin. But I know I am healing, I know I am on a journey towards it. But until I get there, I will call myself “visually-challenged.”

Not because I think my disability is something that will be cured if I try hard enough, but because I know that living in an ableist world will force me to navigate challenges and barriers every single day. I know I will continue to walk into inaccessible buildings, continue to talk to people that treat me with contempt or pity, fight for the accommodations that I need to thrive in my career. All these challenges will confront me. But I also know that I will fight my way through them.

I call myself “visually-challenged” because it reminds me of who I am, and who I strive to be. It reminds me that I am strong, resilient and able to overcome.

I will hold onto this word, “visually-challenged,” as I walk on my journey of healing and growth. And perhaps someday, I will be strong enough to call myself “blind” without reliving the memories, the pain. Someday, I will make this word mine. Someday, I will call myself “blind” and stride through the world with my dried scars proudly bared to the eyes of the world.