What does safety look and feel like to you?

Jamie | Whakatū

Jamie describes how living with vision challenges taught him to recognise his emotions, rely on others, and understand that safety and support are found within community.

“I was born blind in one eye with a condition called congenital glaucoma. So that’s affected me through my whole life. I had eight operations before I was two, and multiple, multiple since then.

I’ll probably go back to this a lot, but my vision has had such a big impact on my life that when I was younger, I didn’t really think about safety. I kind of just went for it and did a lot of things that put myself in a lot of danger.

When my vision started deteriorating, I denied that for a long time and hid away because I didn’t feel safe, but I didn’t actually know that I didn’t feel safe. I was angry for sure. And all of these strong emotions were just directed in the wrong direction for a long time. I had a relationship break up, and I put it all on that. I was angry at this person, or people that were involved in that, and just directed all my anger, frustration, and hurt at that.

When I learnt to identify those emotions and where they were actually coming from – which was really the sense of loss and grief of my vision, but also all of the things that gave me – freedom, safety, and connections with people, I learned to identify different emotions, and that grief was a real big part of it.

I’ve learnt so much about what I need and how to communicate it, and what I need from the relationships in my life. Because I do need to rely on people – I can’t see, I can’t drive, I can’t read bits of paper – those are simple examples, but I need people in my life. I need to be able to ask for help. And so, that’s been a big, big part of it.

I don’t see it as a deficit anymore, which I definitely used to.

I think a lot of men in New Zealand, and probably across the world, feel like we’re supposed to do all these things and look after ourselves and everybody else around us. But actually, we’re part of a community, a unit, and we’re supposed to give but also take as well.”