I first became aware that my way of seeing the world was not neutral through an encounter that felt fleeting at the time but has stayed with me ever since. I was at a community event as a reporter, working on a story about inclusive education, and arrived before the program began. The venue was in that familiar state of anticipation: organizers hurried about with final preparations while guests gathered in small clusters of conversation.
In one corner of the room sat a woman I knew casually with her young daughter, who was blind from birth. I went over to greet them and sat beside them while we waited for the event to begin. After a few moments, her daughter reached for my hand, held it in hers and began exploring it with quiet curiosity.
Her fingers lingered on mine, curious and attentive. Unlike the rounded fingertips of her parents and friends, mine carried short gel nails. I could feel her noticing the difference, tracing my nails carefully, as though mapping something she needed to understand on her own terms.
After a while, she asked softly, “Madam… what is this?” touching my fingernails.
“It is decoration on my nails,” I replied. “Ah, okay,” she said, and touched them again, gently, as if to be sure.
Her hand wandered further, resting on the camera hanging from a strap around my neck.
“What is this?”
“A camera.”
“What do you do with a camera?”
“I take pictures.”
She paused, then asked, “What is a picture?”
The question took me by surprise and I paused to think. How does one explain a picture to a child who is visually impaired?
The question took me by surprise and I paused to think. How does one explain a picture to a child who is visually impaired?
Contrarily to the intellectual pauses I was used to, this pause was emotional. I felt humility at the sudden awareness of the limits of my language. Then fear: fear of getting it wrong, fear of defining something so carelessly that it might become her standard for understanding the world. To some degree, I also felt responsible; I knew that whatever I said next would matter because it would shape how something invisible to her might be imagined. Her mother caught my eye and smiled. Leaning towards me, she whispered that her daughter was smart and endlessly inquisitive. She excused herself to speak with other guests, leaving the girl and me sitting together.
Long before that conversation, I had become accustomed to asking questions as a journalist. What I was less prepared for were the moments when I became the one without answers. Those moments exposed assumptions I did not know I was carrying. One such moment was during the COVID‑19 pandemic. Like everywhere else, we suddenly had a new vocabulary to address living in the pandemic. Social distancing was part of our daily lives, so was the phrase “one meter apart”. These phrases travelled quickly, carried by urgency and fear of an uncertain future. During a COVID-19 dialogue on gender and disability inclusion, which I helped coordinate through SisterSpeak237, the facilitator explained that “one metre apart” meant stretching out your arms and, if you could not touch another person, you were socially distant.
Afterwards, a participant who was blind approached me with a question that stopped me in my tracks:
“What does one metre apart mean?” This was someone I knew well. We had worked together before, so his question felt less like a challenge and more like an invitation to think together.
“That’s a good question,” I said. “Let’s think about it together.”
As I tried to explain what “one metre apart” meant, I found myself returning again and again to visual references.
He smiled and said, “But that’s the problem. Many of us rely on touch, guides, and physical cues to move around, especially in places that aren’t accessible.”
Public health advice assumed a particular way of experiencing space. It asked people to avoid touch when, for many blind people, touch was essential for orientation, safety, and independence. Before the next session began, we agreed to continue the conversation later. We had not found a perfect definition, but we had arrived at something more valuable: the recognition that language is never neutral. The way we explain the world reflects the way we imagine the people living in it.
COVID was shared globally. Exclusion within it was not. That moment sharpened something I had already begun to understand but did not have words for: public communication often assumes a homogeneous audience. These experiences have changed how I explain things. As a journalist, I am more attentive to whose understanding is centred and whose is taken for granted. As an advocate, I have learned that inclusion is not only about access, but about imagination. In everyday conversations, I pause more often, ask different questions and resist the urge to explain quickly.
Looking back at that first encounter with the child, I realize she was asking for more than a definition. She was asking for permission to imagine and build an understanding of the world that did not begin and end with sight. That question continues to guide me. We often assume that misunderstanding happens only across obvious difference. But I have learned that even between sighted people sharing the same language and the same space, meaning and context can be misconstrued. Misunderstanding, I have come to believe, is not an exception. It is part of how human communication works. The danger does not lie in misunderstanding itself, but rather in our refusal to recognize it.
A picture, I have learned, does not need to be seen to exist. It can be described, imagined, felt. Its power lies in its ability to carry experience across differences. I still do not know how best to explain a picture to a child who has never seen. But perhaps that uncertainty is the point. If inclusion asks anything of us, it is this: to recognize that understanding is negotiated and that the world cannot be reduced to a single way of perceiving it. Sometimes, learning to see differently begins with the courage to admit that our vision has limits.