My easily ignored, mildly inconvenient disability

I do have one, indeed I do. Now, it's not a mild disability, by any stretch. In fact, because of this disability I cannot naturally read this text from a foot away. Naturally, I cannot easily make out individual faces, distinguish more than simple shapes, distinguish any shapes that are complex or close in color, make out the difference between salt and white flour just by looking, judge distance efficiently, or tell the difference between a spider and a small piece of fluff unless it moves. (And I also suffer from arachnophobia.)

However, I don't spend much of my life thinking about this disability. It doesn't change my life very much at all, in fact. Because fortunately for me, my disability is not only easy to remedy, it is easily recognized as existing and needing remedied, to the degree where an entire subsection of medicine has been created devoted to diagnosing and treating my disability with minimal waiting time, for an affordable cost.

How lucky for me that I'm only nearsighted.

We have it scarily good, us nearsighted people. As do our close cousins, the farsighted. We are recognized. We are easy to accommodate. We are frequently represented in TV shows, movies, and books. Our disability is easily remedied just by putting on a small, attractive piece of accessory every morning. We can even get custom pieces picked to complement our faces, turning the correction of our vision into a combination fix and fashion statement, without judgment. Imagine, if you will, what the world would think if paraplegics, chronic pain sufferers, and other such folks tried to get about in designer motorized wheelchairs/scooters. My God! they would cry. The waste of money! And how could you glamorize your suffering like that! But nearsighted folk get a free pass. And strangely, you don't hear anyone complaining that people who need corrective lenses are getting in their way, wasting space or resources or whatnot because we can't perform every task a fully-sighted person could perform (even though sometimes we can't).

And it's true that we don't have it perfect. The media is deluged with imagery that shows the visually impaired as either old (eyes degraded due to aging) or intellectual or just plain worthless. Women with glasses are frequently either sexy because of their glasses - "naughty librarian/secretary"/Tina Fey - or waiting for the right moment to conveniently lose them so that their true beauty can shine. (Mia Thermopolis, The Princess Diaries. Toula Portokalos, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.) Men are often either Super Intellectual, in which case they are supportive to the main characters of the story but not allowed to take the post themselves, or they are Geeks - gawky, socially awkward, obsessed with video games or Star Trek or whatever pastime the Blob doesn't happen to understand, and they certainly will never get laid.

Folks with glasses usually don't get to be action heroes - even though plenty of us are physically qualified. Peter Parker, the mild-mannered, nearsighted photographer who became Spider-Man, had his vision magically cured before he took to web-swinging. Dr. Daniel Jackson phased his glasses out of his wardrobe as his role in Stargate SG-1 called for more and more action. And of course we all remember Velma in Scooby-Doo, piteously crawling about on her hands and knees for her precious eyepieces while the other characters were busy running from a monster that she couldn't even see. Yes, we know she got her share of running and we all had a great laugh when she caught Shaggy and Scooby-Doo at the same time - WHOA, she must work out. But there was still that omnipresent threat, that storytellers always consider when they introduce a character with glasses, that they're going to lose their precious eyepiece and be completely incapacitated. Never mind that people with glasses KNOW how to keep our frames on our faces, thank you very much, or that we might have a pair of contact lenses on hand for the occasion, or that even if we do lose our frames we might still be able to make out shapes well enough to figure out who might be an enemy, who might be a friend, and what might be about to fall over on us. Certainly we can't be superheroes, unless we're sitting in the pilot seat of a giant mecha.

What's the end point of all of this? Visibility. Despite being discriminated against in a bajillion little ways and granted several useful privileges in a variety of others, I don't hear a lot of people talking about what it means to need corrective lenses. Usually when someone says they're disabled they mean something else, be they autistic, an amputee, whathaveyou. Meanwhile, us corrective lenses folks have been handily fooled, through the ease with which our problems are solved, into thinking that we are members of the able elite - evolutionarily superior, if you will - and it's not making it any easier for us or for people with disabilities that aren't so easily corrected.

Users of corrective lenses need to pay attention to this part of themselves, bring it out, make it visible. We are disabled. We are not different or special. The only difference is the ways we are treated. Maybe if we start to point out the difference between the way we are treated and the way others with far more marginalized disabilities are treated, people will start to realize how ridiculous the disparity is.

And maybe, if we come out in big enough numbers, we can do more about those stereotypes, too.