Jodey Porter
Special to The Lake Report

When I lost my sight completely almost three years ago, I started a very personal journey, painful and heart-wrenching, to recapture my freedom and independence. 

It was about me, not our community. Now, I believe the story I’ve been telling needs to be heard. 

It really is about us, not me. Although my journey through blindness started as a child some 60 years ago and included a career of contributions in Canada and beyond, it has been my journey with Doc that has helped me focus on what really matters.

In this final instalment of Jodey’s Journey, here is just a bit of what I have learned, what I am still learning.

*****

It is wickedly hard to be fully a part of the community as a blind person.

Even though I have a new capability, a new engine, a new opening, it’s hard coming back to a world where no matter how long you’ve lived, you simply don’t belong.

The hardest thing I think is that everybody talks about inclusion, but it is scary to include a blind person, or somebody in a wheelchair. It is a lot of fuss and confusion.

I think we do a lot of dressing up of how tolerant we are of others. We feel good giving to charity. But inclusion is a whole different art. It means going to another level in terms of understanding what the other person can give and what they can share.

That’s huge and it’s about growing up as a community.

When you lose your vision, it’s not that your hearing gets better (mine has not), but you do start to comprehend in an entirely different way.

Senses awaken in you that you had no idea existed. I think they are primitive. I think they are senses we had before the Industrial Revolution, before we had cellphones and such.

I can hear a wall. I can understand things in an entirely different dimension. 

My perspectives, my edges, my barriers, my contours, my architecture are all defined by sound, by air movement, by sensitivity, by pressure — the things I didn’t know existed in the time before Doc.

Our senses are very vision-oriented. I think they have gone dead in almost all of us. But they’ve been reawakened in me. 

We have all lost a richness of perception that I have, unfortunately, found through losing my vision. But in reality, it is not a loss, it is a gain.

One of the fascinating things for me is the interaction of dog intelligence and human intelligence — working together. And non-verbal working with verbal. 

Working with my new sensual awareness and Doc’s animal intelligence, we’ve reached a dialogue and interconnectedness that I could never have imagined.

We have tapped into both a human and biological (with the animal) kind of perception that most of us have been too lazy to look for or have forgotten. Something very rich and very valuable.

And I think it takes us back to our humanity. I am required to perceive at an entirely different, deeper level, of the architecture of a room, of the people around me, of the pathway ahead. I need to perceive it differently.

My link in all this, with Doc, is the handmade harness. He can feel just the slightest move of my hand. Or the tension. He knows when I’m scared. He can pick right up on that.

So, over the weeks together, we’ve come closer and closer.

We really are a “we.”

I want to get all this to the point where it is just part of our community. That some people use walkers, some people use guide dogs and some don’t.

I’m growing up. It’s made me a better person and I think putting up with me makes the community a better community.

NOTL is a tough place to be a disabled person — not generally welcoming.

But it is welcoming to me. Doc helps with that. But we must keep pushing and fighting. 

If people like me can be part of the community, we become a better community. And if I can be, then so can anyone.

For me, I’m just trying to be fully who I am in a world that doesn’t allow me to be. 

Always fighting. Always hitting the wall with people who want to put you in a box or people who want to feel sorry for you or look down on you.

To me the most important thing in my life is giving back. It’s not waiting for the town to install proper street corners. 

What makes me feel human every day is being able to give back to the community I live in.

It makes me feel not disabled. It makes me feel like a real person.

• For more information about the Seeing Eye Guide Dog School, go to seeingeye.org.

If you live in Niagara-on-the-Lake, are functionally blind or know someone who is, and would like to share experiences and opportunities, please contact me at blink.niagara@gmail.com.

NOTL resident Jodey Porter is a former provincial assistant deputy minister of health and member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Her story is told in collaboration with writer Tim Taylor.