Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

At the gym, I spotted someone holding what looked like a guide cane. (There are different kinds of white canes.)

He was just standing around, looking kinda vague. So when I finished the exercise I was doing, I went over and asked him if he would like any help.

We didn't share much language, but I got the impression he didn't want to be bothered, so I cheerfully went on my way.

But when I was doing my next exercise, he came over and said something about "check weights."

I hopped up with a confidence I soon realized was unearned. I was at that time actually using the only machine I can read the weight numbers on...because they've been repainted by hand. I rarely use the free weights because I can't find the dumbbells I need most of the time -- everything is labeled black-on-black! Why?!

Anyway, he didn't actually want help setting the weights for a machine or finding free weights. He wanted me to read his weight, from a scale that I hadn't even known was in the gym.

The numbers on the scale were so tiny.

Oops: I quickly realized I'm the worst person in the gym for him to ask!

Luckily I had my phone on me, so I could do what I usually do when I'm out and about and something is too small for me to read: took a photo on my phone and zoomed in.

I read out the number to him, and he seemed dismayed. He actually handed me his cane and asked me to read his weight again.

Guide canes are only a meter long, they're hollow, and they're very light. White canes working properly depends on them being very light! Sorry my friend: the number was the same the second time.

Anyway, moral of the story is: sighted people should offer help to a blind person, because if you don't another blind person is gonna recognize their cane and be excited about it and offer help that it turns out I'm shit at actually providing.

I had to go to London for work today, and back.

The experiences of the two journeys could hardly have been more different.

( This is the good half. )

She got me to my train, and left me with the gift of all my train tickets and the ability to have everything charged by the time I got off the train.

I've written so much, and it's so late and I'm so tired, I think I'll have to save the stories of my return journey for tomorrow.

I wrote in October about how excited I was to go swimming in the trans-specific session and then when I got there it was double-booked. "I'll try again next month," I said, and the next month was double booked too.

In December I was let down by public transport and in January we had visitors. In September I was away for work and in August I had to do Gary-care and so on and so forth.

I'd known about this swimming thing for ever and I'd never been able to go!

Today I finally did.

It was surprisingly emotional, to be in an indoor pool again for the first time since I lived across the road from one and had a regular gym membership so that must be six years now. I didn't go a lot though: it was stressful for accessibility-related reasons as well as gender ones I couldn't identify yet.

So stepping in to the warm water was heavenly. I have had a okay time swimming in outdoor pools but it's rare I've gotten the chance to and it's not very accessible especially as I need a wetsuit to do that: just too many things to keep track of and getting changed outdoors is stressful enough for me anyway.

Today's session was well attended but not too big for the little pool. The trainer made sure there was space for me on one edge as I like so I can touch the wall and stay straight (ha) that way as it's impossible for me otherwise.

I still swim on my back as a kind of accessibility thing: it means people won't expect me to be able to see them so hopefully don't mind if I run in to them. So I just do my elementary backstroke and it's so chill and lovely. I don't have to think about it and can just let my mind wander. I'd forgotten how much I used to do this and how good it is for me.

Plenty to think about lately.

"Things blind or partially sighted people wish sighted people knew..." goes the social media post.

The third comment is already from the parent of a blind child.

And of course it's saying "my child can do anything a sighted person can do!"

Yeah. Including grow up with a lot of ableist thought patterns, which is what I did in that environment.

When I went back later, it was a whole thread. Full of stuff like "nothing will stop my VI grandson!"

Okay I hope he can get a job or benefits, I hope he can get a bus or a train!

I know we're still fighting the same misconceptions that were old when I was young, that if the default assumption is that blind people can't do things it's an improvement to say we can. I just wish there was a bit more nuance and less defensiveness, less evidence that the adults in the situation have accepted the ableist premise of society and are still defining success as "exactly the same as a sighted person."

I dunno. Maybe I was just seeing this in the middle of an incredibly busy and kind of demoralizing work day, maybe I'm just projecting from my own visually inspired childhood.

But if nothing else, the question was what blind and partially sighted people want sighted people to know. Can we not have one social media thread without sighted people immediately butting in?

I was sent to Coventry today for work.

When I wanted to get a bus from Warwick University (no I don't know why that's in Coventry either) back to the train station, I went to the bus with the most people standing around it trying to get on and found the driver out there too, on a smoke break.

After ascertaining that this was the correct bus (Me: "Does this go to the train station?" Driver: :big sigh: "Eventually, but with all these roadworks it takes ages!" Sounds like a you-problem, buddy!), I remembered just in time that a lot of buses are more advanced than these we get Oop North, so I added a new question before my usual question to bus drivers when I'm going somewhere unfamiliar. "Do these buses have audio announcements?"

He looked at me pensively and said, "You know, I don't know if they do!"

That was not an answer I was expecting. In a work context, I'm aware of the problems created for visually impaired people by drivers who can turn the announcements off, or turn them down so far as to be useless, because the drivers get irritated listening to them all day. I did not heretofore know that it was possible for a driver to not know whether their bus had this functionality one way or the other!

And of course it wouldn't be great that he was so uninterested in the topic! Even seeing me standing there with my white cane, having been lead there by one of the people I'd been meeting with who said she wasn't going to leave until I got on the bus (big mom-vibes, bless), he didn't seem so much as sheepish that he didn't know about this important accessibility feature.

So I moved on to the question I am used to asking bus drivers when I am going somewhere unfamiliar: "Can you let me know when we get to that stop?"

In Manchester, the drivers usually just grunt at you. ("Or lie," V said when I later regaled them with this story. It is an accurate addition; they do lie because sometimes they say they will do this.) This guy said something like "Yeah! I can do that. If I remember..."

It was extremely clear that he was going to forget by the time I got on the bus.

Which I immediately did. At least I knew where I stood with this guy!

A combination of Citymapper, watching and following the biggest group of people off the bus, and the huge Double Arrow over the doors of the station, I was able to find it fine.

And I proceeded to have absolutely no passenger assistance despite having booked it. I was shown the platform by exactly the kind of bored/helpful/keen/friends with grown-ups teenager that I used to be, and I had to push on to a crowded train myself and try to find a seat myself, which I detest doing and avoiding which is one of the main reasons I rely on passenger assistance.

I'd rather have an honest bus driver tell me he'll forget to help me than a dishonest app tell me that my assistance booking has been confirmed and then show up to nothing at all.

Time from the sighted people leaving the house for a week to me dropping something on the floor that I now cannot find?

Four hours.

Well this evening after dinner I looked at a website that (as far as I can tell anyway) only has a dark mode and it left me with vertigo and a deep desire to go to bed early.

I felt like I was drunk, after maybe ten minutes looking at it.

Sigh.

(This did prompt me to sort out screenreader access on my phone again -- the shortcut stopped working for some reason and I just didn't bother using my phone if I couldn't navigate visually -- but that wouldn't have helped me with this website anyway because I couldn't expand and toggle things that I needed to.)

I woke up from bad dreams -- usual anxiety stuff, plus the disappointing feature of imposing gender dysphoria on myself to attend friends' wedding in a frilly pastel dress; even in the dream I was confused about why I made myself so miserable and I wasn't convinced by my own thought process which was just well, it's a wedding so I have to; even reminding myself upon waking that the first time I wore a masc shirt and smart trousers/dress pants to friends' wedding was ten years ago now didn't release the grip that this unsettling image had on me all day.

Anyway, I woke up from bad dreams with nystagmus so bad that D could tell just from looking at me that my eyes weren't working. It's not a subtle condition, heh. He gave me a much-needed cuddle for the bad dreams and then went to fetch me my work phone from downstairs so I could look at my schedule and see how annoying it would be to skip work today. Fairly annoying, it turns out, and also I started to feel a little better pretty quickly (while still being bad enough at seeing that I didn't even take my glasses downstairs with me much less wear them, until after noon). Determining that I would not sleep, I figured I might as well sit in front of my computer rather than just sit around and be bored.

By the time I came back to my computer after lunch and I was thinking hm I think I might be starting to feel better from this migraine... Then I typed in my password and it didn't work. I frowned, sure it was correct. Did it again. Definitely got it right this time! But I was still locked out. Then I realized I was using the password for my own laptop, on my work computer. A thing I'd never previously done in almost two years at this job!

So yeah. The thing about migraines is that they affect your brain which is also what you rely on to do stuff like "assess how badly this migraine is affecting you."

I wasn't in pain but I was having other weird effects. Like, I was sitting in a fairly dull work meeting (punctuated by the odd moment of absolute shock, like when I asked how a person whose sight doesn't allow them to identify the ID that a public transport support staff member apparently wears on their jacket, like in a little laminated pouch, someone suggested putting braille on the ID which, even apart from being useless to the 90% or so of visually impaired people who don't read braille, would necessitate grabbing the stranger's chest and groping at it for the braille)... Anyway, even sitting in the dull meeting I was so physically anxious that I was shaking like a leaf. Mentally I was fine and it was weird to almost observe myself in this unwarranted physical state.

Then kinda the opposite happened after work when I remembered that the trans weightlifting class I go to some Saturdays now has an associated circuits class on Monday evenings and now I really wanna go tonight, even though I probably still have a migraine and even if not I'm always exhausted by the postdrome so this is just a ridiculous idea. I took it as further proof of how broken my brain is right now. And how much I like circuits. And how my migraine-riddled brain craves endorphins.

Saturday was such a dramatic example of how I can be one of those happy fuckers who ends up absolutely gleeful from exercise: I'd slept very little on Friday night and felt truly awful but had booked for the gym and D was going too so I didn't have to get the bus and the tram...but even so in the car all the way there I was fantasizing about just not getting out of the car or running away or just doing anything at all rather than an hour of weightlifting. And then long before the end of the hour I was bouncing off the walls, delighted and full of enough energy to get me through all the rest of my plans for the day. It doesn't always work for me (often I am left only tired and with the vaguest sense of accomplishment) but when it does work it's a hell of a drug.

It was one thousand percent the right idea not to go to the gym when I didn't even know if I still had a migraine or if I'd moved on to the always-exhausting postdrome stage. But now that I've had to go to bed without my endorphins, of course I am wistful about them, heh.

I feel like I've absorbed so much toxic positivity around my disability that it's very easy to say about today "Thanks for your kind words everyone, but it all went fine and I didn't have anything to worry about!"

It did all go fine, especially because my friend was able to pick me up from the train station which removed the most stressful part of the journey I'd prepared myself for, which was getting to a new place on my own. My kryptonite, I called that earlier today, and it really is.

Before I could know that my friend could rescue me from this (they were waiting for something that was going to happen "between 9:30 and 2:30," could pick me up if it happened before I got there and couldn't if it didn't), I really was struggling.

Occasionally my nystagmus can be so bad it leads to feelings of derealization.

Or maybe it's just that the nystagmus is worsened by stress and derealization also happens when I'm really stressed. Maybe they just share a common ancestor. Regardless, it's really inconvenient and uncomfortable to deal with this.

I said so on social media as I was getting the bus into town, having left the house just too late to get a train that would've been quicker.

And by the time I

• got a tram across town from where the bus dropped me off
• bought a ticket (thank goodness I could do this from a person! I had no idea if the ticket office would be staffed at that station and I physically cannot buy the ticket I needed from a machine even if I'd been able to use the machines (apparently 3% of blind and partially sighted people can use those touchscreen ticket machines without difficulty and I'm in the 97%!)
• just missed a train
• thought I had to wait 40 minutes for the next one
• went for a pee (yet again bemoaning the lack of hooks or shelves or anywhere to put anything in accessible toilets)
• came back to find two staff near the display boards which also had a big sticker on the floor saying "Passenger Assist meeting point" and a little kiosk saying "information point" which was now staffed, but by someone busy chatting to his station but the other staff member so neither of them paid any attention to the guy with a noticeable limp and a white cane peering very hesitantly at the display boards above them
• found another train 15 minutes sooner than I expected which gave my slow self just enough time to get there
• determined the platform
• found the lifts to get there (I'd only ever used the stairs at this station but there are a lot of them so with my ankle as it is today I wanted the lifts)
• worried I was on the wrong platform because I didn't think the next train expected there could be out of the way in time
• heard an announcement minutes before my train saying it was now coming in on a different platform)
• got to the right platform (luckily no more lifts were needed)
• got on the train
• found a seat as far as I could get from others (which meant being near the toilet and I guess that was smelly because the one person sitting near me made a point of getting up and closing the door when someone leaving left it open, but I didn't notice anything -- yet another reason to wear a mask!) and
• read the number of very kind replies on my phone

...I was able to feel much more grounded.

So yeah, it went fine. All that stuff happened though. And that's part of what I'd call an incredibly smooth journey. Maybe it's okay that I get anxious and exhausted when traveling or sometimes just considering traveling? It's not as if I'm incorrect in the assessment of the situation that leads me to such anxiety.

I don't want to minimize that just because it all went smoothly.

Anyway I had a great day with my friend and the kids: two of whom have grown so much since I saw them, the littlest of whom didn't even exist the last time I saw her family and she's already a year old! It was great.

For a day off, what a busy day!

I arranged a couple of chats today, because of the day off, for the organization I volunteer with. Mostly I'm part of a group making decisions but today I had to/got to represent those decisions and attempting to answer questions about them one-on-one. I wasn't too worried about it but it was nerve-wracking. They both went well though.

Then, my new All-Terrain Cane showed up! I hadn't really known what to expect and it helped to watch this video where, among other things, the inventor talks about how he came to do this (I gotta admire anyone who'd go into an outdoors store and say "show me your blind hiking section"!) and there's footage of him using it to like clamber over rocks and walk deftly along uneven trails. I wasn't sure how a rollerball tip would work on a weight-supporting cane but of course it does when you're on grass/sand/dirt/mud/etc. I tested it out a little this afternoon on some grass/mud nearby, which I know quite well but I still got the impression that this is a useful thing to have.

Then tonight D suddenly got the idea to make and elaborately decorate a cake for a friend tomorrow. When he was still telling me about his plan, at one point he said "Sorry, I'm just excited because I have a project." I grinned; it was good to see his I'm Excited I've Got a Project face again, it'd been a little while. I could help with the ingredient-buying and cake-baking but I know nothing about fondant icing -- but luckily, his mum does! So she got a surprise phone call from him after 9pm tonight.

It got late because we already had our usual fortnightly plan to tune in to readings of "Edwyrdian Tales," so we had a late dinner after the ingredient-buying, half way through the cake-batter-making, for some fun supernatural stories.

The cake is made, the fondant is colored, the actual decoration will happen tomorrow.

Gary has been at a few points sleepily baffled by how high-energy everyone has been after his bedtime. It has been a couple of unusually busy evenings for us, at the last minute. They have been fun but I hope tomorrow I can manage to eat my dinner before 7:30!

And somehow after all this I have to go back to work tomorrow?!