If there is one thing you need to give credit to disability for, it is teaching resilience to those who are affected by it. This resilience comes not just from overcoming challenging situations, but also from handling endless number of embarrassing events. Of course, everyone has clumsy moments, but being a disabled person comes with its own share of unique and funny oops situations.
As a person who has lived and conquered over a visual impairment for almost two decades, I have my own endless list of embarrassing incidents. However, following are the top five events that happen again and again to me.
Disclaimer: This blog is written purely with the aim of tickling your funny bone so feel free to laugh out loud on account of my embarrassment.
#1 Shaking hands
This is the most frequently embarrassing situation I find myself in. due to my eye condition, my central vision is most damaged and so if I’m focusing on the face of the person standing in front of me, I usually can’t see what they are doing with their hands. As a result, it happens so often that people extend their hand to shake with me and I don’t respond. The top most such embarrassing incidents are as follows:
- At a Christmas party at my work place, the Head of the institute extended her hand when I wished her ‘Merry Christmas’. After a few seconds with me standing there like a statue, my mother nudged my hand forward.
- At my cousin’s engagement, my would be brother in law, whom I was meeting for the first time, offered to shake hands when I introduced myself to him. I could make out that he gave a strange expression for a few seconds after my introduction. It was only when he moved on to introduce himself to my other cousins that I realized he was shaking hands with everyone else and the light went on in my head. To remedy things a bit, I went up to him after the ceremony was over and shook hands with him in congratulations.
- A senior colleague of mine extended her hand to congratulate me when I got the job and joined the institution. Again, I realized she must have wanted to shake hands when she gave a confused expression. However it was too late….
#2 Stepping on cute puppies
If you are blind in India, you don’t just need to be scared of being hit by a car while walking on the road, you also need to be afraid you will bump into some or the other stray animal. This can be scary for both you and the animal.
Of course, these incidents occurred before I started using the cane.
At the first occasion, it was an autumn morning and so there were a lot of fallen leaves on the street. The setting included me, another girl and a cleaning staff who was in the process of shoving said fallen leaves off the path. And under the cover of a heap of leaves was a tiny puppy. I don’t know whether a sighted person would have been able to see the pup or not but I of course didn’t and so I stepped on it. The puppy shrieked and I started apologizing to it (which of course was of no use as dogs don’t really understand the word ‘sorry’).
Anyway, as if it wasn’t enough that I was feeling super guilty, the girl turned and gave me a nasty look and the cleaning worker made me feel ashamed of my action by making some remark about my cruelty.
At another occasion, a sandy coloured dog was lounging on a sandy coloured brick path and I kicked it with my foot. As this was a grown dog, I myself stumbled and fell down at the impact. Fortunately the dog didn’t bite me. but yeah, I felt more embarrassed than scared.
#3 When people give me cash
So I know there are mobile applications that boast of helping the blind identify cash money, but these are a fairly new invention and in my experience, they still need a lot of improvement. Thus each time someone hands cash to me, whether they be returning change or giving me money they owe to me, I just accept it without counting.
I know it sounds more like a foolish thing than an embarrassing one, but you will understand if you imagine me in a situation where the person actually expects me to count the money. Because I’m not totally blind and mostly strangers cannot make out that I can’t see, they often don’t understand that I cannot count cash. And so if they give me money and look at me expectantly for me to count it, it creates an awkward situation where I don’t know how to respond next.
#4 Recognizing long lost relatives
Oh god! If you have a large extended family whom you meet at the occasional wedding or festival, you would relate to this situation regardless of whether you have a disability or not. You would be oh so familiar with a lady approaching you with a big grin on her face and putting up the million dollar question “pehchana humein?” (did you recognize me?).
Well, generally also, I just want to ask them, “if you yourself claim that I was 2 years old when you last saw me, how the hell can you expect me to recognize you?”
But as I can’t recognize people by their faces, this task becomes difficult even in case of relatives I met a few months back whose voice I don’t remember.
And as these are the people whose queries about my disability exceed the general curiosity that every person shows, I find it easier to just smile and nod and wait for someone else to give me a hint, than to stand for half an hour explaining the what, how and why of my eye condition.
#5 Playing the perfect hostess
When guests come over to my place, those guests who don’t know me very well and upon whom we need to make a good impression, it can get a bit complicated. I must point out here that the ‘guests’ themselves are not the cause of the awkwardness. I love meeting new people and socializing and am the best entertainer. The problem arises when drinks need to be served and dishes need to be passed around.
To be specific, such an oops moment occurred when a suiter for my sister, along with his family, came to meet us for the first time. So I was the one tasked with the serving of drinks and sweets, while my sister sat there being all coy. This task I did well. It was after the drinks and sweets had been consumed, my uncle asked me to remove all the glasses and dishes from the table. A- oh! Because, you see, I can’t exactly see where everyone had kept their empty glasses (which were of course transparent now that the mango juice inside them had been consumed). As I didn’t exactly want to go around knocking off glasses in my attempt to find them on the table, I ignored this instruction of my uncle. However, the used glasses were truly annoying him and so he repeated the command. Well… bless my mother for taking it upon her to fulfil this task and saving me from a potentially disastrous event.
All’s well that ends well…
I know many such incidents happen to many people with disabilities. And although they make for ROFL stories later on, in that moment, you just want to melt into the ground.
Nevertheless, its important to find the humour in them, as that’s the silver lining in these dark clouds.
If you have such stories to share or want to read more such incidents posted by others, visit the Dark Clouds page of the website.
