INDEPENDENT LIVING?

I made what I thought is an interesting observation today when talking to someone connected with Social Services: “Blind people are told, when living in supported housing, that it’s independent living and yet sighted people are becoming ever increasingly dependent on technology; often have friends and family to call upon for help and grown sighted children are often still living at home well into their twenties while their blind counterparts are housed in flats, having been given inadequate preparation in mainstream schools and special schools in order to face life outside them”.

Of course I am not suggesting that either position is one of choice for either group. Sighted adults who are still living at home with parents can be the victims of unforeseen circumstances which include crippling debts incurred as students and inability to get onto the housing ladder or to find somewhere to rent at a price they can afford. Like their visually impaired peers they may also find enormous difficulty getting jobs but even in these days the chances of them finding work as compared with blind youngsters of a similar age are greater not only because of the scope being wider for the sighted but also because of the real prejudice which still exists about employing someone blind.

There is, however, something really irritating to me about the phrase: “It’s independent living” which makes me want to wallop the person uttering it. I hear it regularly where I live which is in my supported housing scheme where the staff are efficient and kind. Of course I know why it’s said. The fact that there are staff would encourage those who either think they are helpless because they now face severe or total sight loss to needlessly turn to them for the least little thing which they could and should be taught to do for themselves. Also it is said to stop the lazy from using the staff as servants or entering into a competition with other tenants to see who can get the most attention from them. However, it can have a counterproductive effect by discouraging those in real need asking for the help they require. Many sighted people do things in pairs especially if they have partners. Hubby gets the car out and helps load the shopping (no not every hubby does nor does every partner. This I know and accept); a wife or husband who works may well have the dinner ready for the other when they come home. My support worker’s partner has hers ready sometimes. One Sunday she told me she was going home to a meal he was cooking – Lamb I think. Of course she’d been doing the nightshift here on Saturday and Saturday afternoon too, plus Sunday morning so deserved it and anyway I accept it’s none of my business what people do. I only mean to make the point that sighted people are often in a state of dependence, one upon another, where as we carry our burdens, both emotional and those imposed by sensory loss without the support of someone exclusively of our own. Instead we share too few overworked staff with too many others and we’re the lucky ones! Plenty of blind people are living unsupported lives in isolation without the help they need to cope or are struggling in appallingly run housing schemes like the last one I was in and this makes that phrase: “It’s independent living” all the more irritating than it may otherwise be.

The fact that blind youngsters today do not have adequate social, life skills or in some instances even an adequate education because they have been put in a class at school either with those with whom they can’t keep up if in mainstream or with others with an assortment of learning difficulties as well means that they will be in a state of dependence and totally unable to maximise their own potential or reach it. For them, this phrase has an especially hollow ring.

When I think about it, I get my own shopping, do my own cooking and washing, organise my own finances and manage with just one hour’s help in the flat, all that with a back problem and with me not seeing a hand in front of me, then I think how dependent all the sighted people are that I know – One upon another and upon technology in the form of satnav; calculators; spell checkers; the last thing I want to be told is that: “It’s independent living”. There’s no greater example of independent living than I am. “Rubbish”! I hear you cry. “Hypocrisy”! I hear you shout and all because I am living in supported housing for the blind. Now that I know the way to the shops; how to use the washing machine; (I knew how to use others in other places incidentally just in case you think I’m a late developer); have a scanner to read my mail and know how to operate my cooker, I rarely need the help of the staff. I do have the security of knowing they are here and would probably not be eligible for council accommodation anyway since I’ve not lived in the county long enough and am adequately housed so there’s your reason why I’m here apart from being so near to the shops, which helps me maintain this independence everyone goes on at such length about. Of course I too have a reliance on technology but it helps me do what, had I not lost my sight, my eyes would help me do. Those with their eyes have substituted their faculties which they could train and with which they were well endowed with a technology which makes them lazy; spoon feeds them and makes them as helpless without it as we are without the training we need to cope in a world not geared to our needs. Then, whereas they take their dependence on others and technology for granted, we on the other hand are repeatedly told how independent we must be – Every day; all the time and often while having to emotionally support and nurture ourselves too.

There are those who say we’re at least not lumbered with the problems of partners and children if we’re on our own and of course many blind people are in relationships where there is the mutual dependence, one upon another, that I have mentioned. We are not insulated or isolated from the problems of others. Who do the weaker and more helpless, sadder and lonelier blind people come to for help? Of course they come to the more able for emotional support; advice and encouragement. Here, unlike the last dump I lived in, the staff encourage us to get those people to turn to them since they are efficient and don’t use those of us who are better able to cope as avenues of escape from their professional obligations. That’s what makes this place so lovely to live in. However, because they’re so few in number and overworked, I want to assist other tenants where I can. I have great difficulty in restraining that urge partly because of the way I am but also because for the sixteen years in which I lived in South-west London, I could see that people needed help and didn’t feel I could walk away knowing they’d have a poor deal if someone – Either another more able person or I didn’t do something. I just long for the abolition of the phrase: “It’s independent living” for none of us can claim to be truly independent. Is the above sour grapes just because I don’t have someone to warm my slippers for me and put the kettle on when I feel irritable; lazy; hacked off by blindness and sick of an aching back? Course it is! Well folks, watch this space. I may soon have a stinking wet Labrador to be responsible for as well! Can’t wait! I’ll moan to her and oh blimey! I’ll have to take her out on a cold wet day in Paul Simon’s famous deep and dark December. Why? Because ‘’’’’’Altogether now! “It’s independent living”!