New feature for emails >500 words: skip the reading and listen to or watch me read this edition of this newsletter (5:36).

Hi Musings subscribers,

I know I haven’t popped into your inbox with a Musing for a few months (although I do have four mostly-edited editions hanging out in drafts). In the meantime, I’ve been reckoning with the next steps in my book project. It’s far enough along and received enough glowing feedback from other writers that I’m now in the initial research phase of querying agents and knocking the thing into a book proposal. The further I’ve gotten into this phase, the more I’ve realized I don’t want to wait until the book is done to start doing the kind work I want the book to do. 

In short: I want to help people adapt to their disabilities using my experience and story as a jumping off point. As a pleasant side effect, being out in the world doing the work is likely to help with marketing the book. The dreaded “platform” section of the book proposal will suck less if I, uh, have something to stand on.

Amidst this growing clarity, I got the annual late fall email that’s been showing up in my inbox since 2022: the reminder that the priority deadline for Portland State University’s Orientation and Mobility graduate certificate is in January. This time around, I actually did the numbers on how much it would cost, and, finding the figure somewhat in harmony with my ‘maybe grad school’ fund, I attended some info sessions. Then, looking at the long list of marketing activities I had planned for my business in January, I joined a time-honored tradition: I mostly ignored my to-do list and applied to grad school.

Orientation and Mobility (O&M) specialists help blind and low vision folks learn to travel safely through a variety of environments using a variety of tools, including white canes. Last year’s O&M application deadline email sequence was the final push I needed to switch to using a white cane. 

There’s a devastating shortage of O&M specialists worldwide; at the time I finally got a diagnosis for my visual impairment in early 2022, the only people eligible for the state’s O&M program were folks with no light perception or who were expected to lose light perception within 18 months. To put that in perspective, let’s imagine vision WITH corrective lenses on a scale from 0-100. A vision rating of 100 is two eyes that work together and can both be corrected to see 20/20; a 0 on this is no light perception. Legally blind is 0-10. I’m rolling with vision that hangs out somewhere in the 15-25 on this scale depending on symptom load. The shortage of O&M specialists is so severe that only folks at a 0-1 rating are getting O&M care. Also worth noting: I’ve been reading a lot of blind and low vision memoir as part of my book research, and every white cane user has mentioned both reluctance to use a cane and regret that they didn’t use theirs more often sooner.

I tried to find a private pay O&M specialist for myself several times, and ultimately resorted to YouTube and written materials to teach myself how to use a white cane. It hasn’t been quite a year yet, and it difficult to exaggerate how much more comfortable and confident I am with a white cane. Just having most people I encounter recognize that I may not see them is tremendously helpful, and it gives me license to loudly ask people who haven’t noticed me to make way for me. I’m way less worried about stepping on someone’s toes these days because chances are the cane is going to encounter those feet before I do. 

(I still live in terror of accidentally maiming a small dog whose person is wholly absorbed by their phone.)

I want to learn to use a white cane properly; I’m also resistant to authority and skeptical of hierarchical structures so doing this in a graded academic environment is going to be hilarious. I want to be part of the solution to other people getting white cane training in the conventional O&M 1:1 setting. I also want to take what I know about remote learning and the broader disability community and experiment with 1:many learning models (like, cough, a book) so that folks experiencing major vision changes can still benefit from what O&M specialists know.

I should get the official word on whether I’ve made it the interview stage of admissions sometime in February. In the meantime, back to working on marketing my coaching business. Maybe this time I’ll believe myself when I  it’s all good practice for eventually marketing the book.

Back next month, probably,

Kat

PS: Special thanks to Genevieve Conaty, who received an early version of this newsletter via text message, adding a whole new level of “shoulda been an email” to my messaging history.