There has been some discussion lately among some of the HPS parents about their young children beginning to realize that they're a bit different than everyone else. Some of the kids are becoming aware that they don't see as well as everyone else, or that they look a bit different. The discussion made me think of an essay I wrote 10 years ago. To be honest, today I'd probably write this a bit differently - but I thought I'd share it anyway.
I’ve Got the Power
By Heather Kirkwood
To say that one is different, unique or even odd isn’t saying much. It is, after all, part of the human condition that no two people, not even identical twins, are exactly alike. The one thing we universally share are our differences–our individual blends of DNA and life experience that shape our tastes and outlook on the world.
When people come together, however, it is most often our similarities, not our differences, which cause us to commune with one another. Our common interests, talents, opinions or even needs serve as the ties that bind us. Political activism and correctness aside, our differences all too often are the wedges that fuel our division, and thus to be regarded as different is to be viewed as separate-apart from the norm. To be different is to stand on the other side of the river of life and construct bridges to the other side.
“Heather,” a friend said to me recently in that guarded tone of voice people use when they are about to ask you something they think might be offensive, even if it isn’t. “When did you know you were different?”
“I don’t know,” I replied having never given the topic much thought. It didn’t occur to me to question her assumption however. At 24 I’ve spent two-thirds of my life trying to melt into society, and the last third embracing the parts of my being that make me stand out.
Mind you, I’m not monsterly different, but my extremely pale skin and blonde hair, coupled with my white eyebrows and eyelashes and eyes that turn red in the light as a result of albinism have, from time to time, been noticed as unusual. The white can I use to detect stairs or poles doesn’t lend its self to melting into oblivion either.
“I love shopping with you,” another friend said recently as we made our way through a crowd at an art festival, we both felt sure, was trying to break a record for most people standing in one place simultaneously. “It is like the parting of the red sea,” she said, ”People see you coming and they fall all over themselves to get out of the way.” Even in a crowd of thousands, people instantly recognize my differentness, not my similarity to them.
But when did I really know I was different?
It wasn’t preschool, I mused, because everyone at preschool was blind. It wasn’t when my mother would pull the sunglasses I wore outside at all times from her purse as we left the mall. I thought everyone did that.
Nor was it even the first day of first grade when the teacher told me to pick out a seat, and I gleefully selected one, third row center, only to be told that I had to sit in the first row, next to a boy!
Perhaps it was on the school bus where I discovered how different I really was. Somehow the constantly empty seat next to me in a bus full of kids three-deep on every bench was a clue.
But the clincher was a particularly irritating third-grader. One day he leaned over the seat, taking a large piece of my long blonde hair in his hand and yanked hard.
“Ouch!” I yelped.
“Quiet back there!” the bus driver, an extremely rotund woman with a fondness for bright floral prints, screamed. There was no point in explaining to this woman that I was being tortured just four seats behind her. She could see it all in the rear-view mirror, and she didn’t care.
“When you were born,” the third-grader continued, “You shot out of your mamma, right past the doctor, and landed in a can of white paint. That’s why you’re so white,” he scowled.
The image was painfully clear to me. It played out in my mind the rest of the way home–something between a network miniseries and a roadrunner cartoon. I could hear the soap-opera-like music in the background, see the camera zooming in on my mother’s pain-riddled face as someone yelled, “Push, Susan, Push!” I could see a greenish sheet draped over her spread legs, and the doctor strategically in the middle, like a hockey goalie, just like on TV.
“One more time.....Push!” And then there would be a sound like a Champaign cork as I popped out and shot right past the doctor, flew threw the air, and landed with a cartoon-like splash in that can of white paint.
At home I burst into tears, telling my mother what the third grader had said. It must have been hard to contain her laughter at the absurd scenario.
But to a six-year-old, this was serious.
Adults often shrug their shoulders at the cruelty of children, either because they aren’t sure how to respond, or because they view the barbs of children as a kind of right of passage. But the truth about angelic children is that there is a dark side to kidom that separates the kids from the freaks with Darwinian precision. And I was the playground freak.
Not that my childhood was unhappy or that I never made friends. I simply had an ample share of childhood teasing thrown my may. A few favorites, “Ghost, tard, and white poopy girl.” Somehow anything using the word, “poopy” was regarded as the ultimate insult, especially if a reference to one’s mother could be worked into the bargain.
In junior high the name calling progressed to various objects, such as trash cans, being pushed in front of me so I’d hit them at full speed and find myself spread eagle in the hallway.
By high school, however, things had changed. I was still different, shifting between high school clicks and yet never a completely accepted part of any of them. But somehow it didn’t matter as much.
By that time my parents had divorced and my mother, brother and I had moved to Germany. I went to an American high school, but our student body was diverse enough that something as odd as reading everything in 24-point type was barely noticed. Kids that had grown up in the worst sections of infamous places like East St. Louis or Harlem, mixed with tuition-paying students, the offspring of corporate executives delighted to find an English speaking school. And as I didn’t yet use a cane, I melted into the woodwork, one amongst the collection.
Here being accepted was not a requirement for being respected. I ran for president of the student body and was voted most likely to succeed by my class.
But as I graduated a fear took hold that I suspect most of my classmates didn’t share. These things that made me different had afforded me a certain level of protection. The teachers that never seemed to notice when I was being teased somehow were always there when something seemed too hard to see, or too hard to try. Rising above such low expectations wasn’t much of a challenge. But leaving for college thousands of miles away from home back in the United States intimidated me. It would be an adjustment for anyone, but for me, unable to read street signs or see streetlights, it was terrifying.
Thankfully, I accepted an offer to attend a summer rehabilitation program for blind people in Ruston, Louisiana. I could count the number of other blind people I’d known growing up on one hand, but within a week I found myself at a convention of the National Federation of the Blind among 3,000 cane-wielding and dog using freaks just like me.
Eagerly I absorbed everything that was said. I devoured the group’s philosophy that blind people could do just about anything with the appropriate alternative techniques such as Braille or cane travel. In high school I would have regarded being referred to as blind as an insult, but here, among blind professionals, blind parents, blind government representatives; it was a badge of honor.
Suddenly my blindness was no longer my distinguishing feature.
The cane I had only used in high school as a microphone in my bedroom, when, secretly, I pretended to be a pop music star, was now carried with pride the way homosexuals wear pink triangles in parades.
I was no longer, Heather, the white poopy girl playground freak, but instead, Heather, blind woman of the world.
Constant reminders of my differentness can’t be avoided, whether it is the cement truck that backed into a red sports car as the driver yelled out his window that he was on his way to “help” me. Or perhaps the newspaper editors, who using every ounce of journalistic talent they could muster, asked me in job interviews if I could drive.
But I’ve come to like being different. It makes understanding the other freaks of the world that much easier. And we all know, the freaks have the majority.
Soon after I left the rehabilitation program and settled into college life, I fell in with a fellow group of freaks at my small, church-run, liberal arts college. Most of the other students came from small towns in western Kansas, but the five of us stuck out, and through that first year, hung together. Two of the girls were from Japan, one from Argentina and one was the other American with foreign roommates.
We often went for walks across campus late at night, or perhaps to a local hangout, doing what freshman girls do best–gossip.
One evening, Deborah, the other American, swiped my cane as we sat at the top of the 75 stairs that lead up to the administration building. She stood up on a ledge formed by the planters flanking the stairs and shook my long white cane, shouting through the quiet of the night, “I’ve got the power!” She borrowed the phrase from a popular song at the time. We all laughed, but temporarily borrowing my cane to shout this phrase in moments that seemed too still, or stressful became commonplace in our group. As we went for our nightly walks across campus, the girls fought over my cane, the night air being cut by the shrill sound of young women, shaking a long white staff in the air shouting, “I’ve got the power.”
And they were right. I did.
I’ve Got the Power
By Heather Kirkwood
To say that one is different, unique or even odd isn’t saying much. It is, after all, part of the human condition that no two people, not even identical twins, are exactly alike. The one thing we universally share are our differences–our individual blends of DNA and life experience that shape our tastes and outlook on the world.
When people come together, however, it is most often our similarities, not our differences, which cause us to commune with one another. Our common interests, talents, opinions or even needs serve as the ties that bind us. Political activism and correctness aside, our differences all too often are the wedges that fuel our division, and thus to be regarded as different is to be viewed as separate-apart from the norm. To be different is to stand on the other side of the river of life and construct bridges to the other side.
“Heather,” a friend said to me recently in that guarded tone of voice people use when they are about to ask you something they think might be offensive, even if it isn’t. “When did you know you were different?”
“I don’t know,” I replied having never given the topic much thought. It didn’t occur to me to question her assumption however. At 24 I’ve spent two-thirds of my life trying to melt into society, and the last third embracing the parts of my being that make me stand out.
Mind you, I’m not monsterly different, but my extremely pale skin and blonde hair, coupled with my white eyebrows and eyelashes and eyes that turn red in the light as a result of albinism have, from time to time, been noticed as unusual. The white can I use to detect stairs or poles doesn’t lend its self to melting into oblivion either.
“I love shopping with you,” another friend said recently as we made our way through a crowd at an art festival, we both felt sure, was trying to break a record for most people standing in one place simultaneously. “It is like the parting of the red sea,” she said, ”People see you coming and they fall all over themselves to get out of the way.” Even in a crowd of thousands, people instantly recognize my differentness, not my similarity to them.
But when did I really know I was different?
It wasn’t preschool, I mused, because everyone at preschool was blind. It wasn’t when my mother would pull the sunglasses I wore outside at all times from her purse as we left the mall. I thought everyone did that.
Nor was it even the first day of first grade when the teacher told me to pick out a seat, and I gleefully selected one, third row center, only to be told that I had to sit in the first row, next to a boy!
Perhaps it was on the school bus where I discovered how different I really was. Somehow the constantly empty seat next to me in a bus full of kids three-deep on every bench was a clue.
But the clincher was a particularly irritating third-grader. One day he leaned over the seat, taking a large piece of my long blonde hair in his hand and yanked hard.
“Ouch!” I yelped.
“Quiet back there!” the bus driver, an extremely rotund woman with a fondness for bright floral prints, screamed. There was no point in explaining to this woman that I was being tortured just four seats behind her. She could see it all in the rear-view mirror, and she didn’t care.
“When you were born,” the third-grader continued, “You shot out of your mamma, right past the doctor, and landed in a can of white paint. That’s why you’re so white,” he scowled.
The image was painfully clear to me. It played out in my mind the rest of the way home–something between a network miniseries and a roadrunner cartoon. I could hear the soap-opera-like music in the background, see the camera zooming in on my mother’s pain-riddled face as someone yelled, “Push, Susan, Push!” I could see a greenish sheet draped over her spread legs, and the doctor strategically in the middle, like a hockey goalie, just like on TV.
“One more time.....Push!” And then there would be a sound like a Champaign cork as I popped out and shot right past the doctor, flew threw the air, and landed with a cartoon-like splash in that can of white paint.
At home I burst into tears, telling my mother what the third grader had said. It must have been hard to contain her laughter at the absurd scenario.
But to a six-year-old, this was serious.
Adults often shrug their shoulders at the cruelty of children, either because they aren’t sure how to respond, or because they view the barbs of children as a kind of right of passage. But the truth about angelic children is that there is a dark side to kidom that separates the kids from the freaks with Darwinian precision. And I was the playground freak.
Not that my childhood was unhappy or that I never made friends. I simply had an ample share of childhood teasing thrown my may. A few favorites, “Ghost, tard, and white poopy girl.” Somehow anything using the word, “poopy” was regarded as the ultimate insult, especially if a reference to one’s mother could be worked into the bargain.
In junior high the name calling progressed to various objects, such as trash cans, being pushed in front of me so I’d hit them at full speed and find myself spread eagle in the hallway.
By high school, however, things had changed. I was still different, shifting between high school clicks and yet never a completely accepted part of any of them. But somehow it didn’t matter as much.
By that time my parents had divorced and my mother, brother and I had moved to Germany. I went to an American high school, but our student body was diverse enough that something as odd as reading everything in 24-point type was barely noticed. Kids that had grown up in the worst sections of infamous places like East St. Louis or Harlem, mixed with tuition-paying students, the offspring of corporate executives delighted to find an English speaking school. And as I didn’t yet use a cane, I melted into the woodwork, one amongst the collection.
Here being accepted was not a requirement for being respected. I ran for president of the student body and was voted most likely to succeed by my class.
But as I graduated a fear took hold that I suspect most of my classmates didn’t share. These things that made me different had afforded me a certain level of protection. The teachers that never seemed to notice when I was being teased somehow were always there when something seemed too hard to see, or too hard to try. Rising above such low expectations wasn’t much of a challenge. But leaving for college thousands of miles away from home back in the United States intimidated me. It would be an adjustment for anyone, but for me, unable to read street signs or see streetlights, it was terrifying.
Thankfully, I accepted an offer to attend a summer rehabilitation program for blind people in Ruston, Louisiana. I could count the number of other blind people I’d known growing up on one hand, but within a week I found myself at a convention of the National Federation of the Blind among 3,000 cane-wielding and dog using freaks just like me.
Eagerly I absorbed everything that was said. I devoured the group’s philosophy that blind people could do just about anything with the appropriate alternative techniques such as Braille or cane travel. In high school I would have regarded being referred to as blind as an insult, but here, among blind professionals, blind parents, blind government representatives; it was a badge of honor.
Suddenly my blindness was no longer my distinguishing feature.
The cane I had only used in high school as a microphone in my bedroom, when, secretly, I pretended to be a pop music star, was now carried with pride the way homosexuals wear pink triangles in parades.
I was no longer, Heather, the white poopy girl playground freak, but instead, Heather, blind woman of the world.
Constant reminders of my differentness can’t be avoided, whether it is the cement truck that backed into a red sports car as the driver yelled out his window that he was on his way to “help” me. Or perhaps the newspaper editors, who using every ounce of journalistic talent they could muster, asked me in job interviews if I could drive.
But I’ve come to like being different. It makes understanding the other freaks of the world that much easier. And we all know, the freaks have the majority.
Soon after I left the rehabilitation program and settled into college life, I fell in with a fellow group of freaks at my small, church-run, liberal arts college. Most of the other students came from small towns in western Kansas, but the five of us stuck out, and through that first year, hung together. Two of the girls were from Japan, one from Argentina and one was the other American with foreign roommates.
We often went for walks across campus late at night, or perhaps to a local hangout, doing what freshman girls do best–gossip.
One evening, Deborah, the other American, swiped my cane as we sat at the top of the 75 stairs that lead up to the administration building. She stood up on a ledge formed by the planters flanking the stairs and shook my long white cane, shouting through the quiet of the night, “I’ve got the power!” She borrowed the phrase from a popular song at the time. We all laughed, but temporarily borrowing my cane to shout this phrase in moments that seemed too still, or stressful became commonplace in our group. As we went for our nightly walks across campus, the girls fought over my cane, the night air being cut by the shrill sound of young women, shaking a long white staff in the air shouting, “I’ve got the power.”
And they were right. I did.
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