The new cast of Dancing with the Stars has been announced. Don’t know the difference between a paso doble and Viennese waltz? No problem. Stay with me anyway.
One of the contestants this season is Danelle Umstead, an alpine skier. I became familiar with Danelle when I was riveted to the Paralympics earlier this year; Danelle is visually impaired. Her husband, Rob, is her guide when she skies and my husband and I both agreed while watching them compete that I would be yelling at him the entire time if we were in their positions.
A viewer of every season of DWTS, I have wonderyed when this day would come. There have been two hearing impaired competitors and two amputees, if my memory is better than my sight, and I am excited to follow her through this experience.
However, I can already predict what will begin to happen, not on the ballroom but in my life. Friends and family, meaning well, will tell me about this woman because we both have compromised sight. And they will begin to think that her vision, or lack thereof, and mine are the same. It’s an honest mistake, made completely without malice, but it is difficult to be gracious when you feel as if the comparison is a measurement of her accomplishments versus my own. This perception, made not with my damaged optic nerves but the other damaged parts of my head, is as distorted as my sight. But none less real to me.
In the post, They Don’t Buy It, I talked about peoples’ reactions when I tell them I am legally blind. A recent addition to the responses has been the person relating to me that they know someone who has cataracts or just had LASIK surgery, or how they themselves “can’t see a thing” without their glasses. Like the influx of “Did you see the blind girl on Dancing with the Stars?”, I can see it coming from a mile away and it’s all born from a place of good, a desire to show an interest in me and to connect. My destination needs to match its origin; this is the dance I will be learning this season.
