It can be hard to take a compliment gracefully. Sometimes we feel undeserving. Other times we wonder if we are being manipulated. There are times we feel a compliment is discordant with our actual achievement, such as when veterans of recent wars recoil from “Thank you for your service.”
I’ve been exchanging emails with someone I’ll call Anita. In one of her warm messages, she wrote: “I have to say I’m full of admiration for what you have achieved. It would be admirable for a sighted person to do what you have done, and I have to say I still don’t think I completely understand it all but as a blind person …”
She meant well, and good intentions do matter. Still, I felt discomfort, as I have on receiving similar compliments in the past. Some people will understand my ambivalence, but others, including some who are disabled, will say I’m being overly sensitive. I’m not sure I fully understand it myself. This essay is an attempt to figure it out.
Perhaps the most obvious explanation is a desire to be measured on our achievements irrespective of disability, health issues, race, gender or other outside factor. In the everyday world of work, performance matters, not how well we do in spite of this or that disadvantage.
Yet last week I spent an evening with a friend who is going through a long process of deteriorating vision. While exchanging war stories about office life, we acknowledged that many tasks are harder for visually impaired people. We admitted we were pleased with our successes in overcoming obstacles, as well as frustrated at those we couldn’t. If I concede that much in conversation with someone who shares my disability, how can I be unhappy that someone who doesn’t praises how I’ve adapted?
I started out with a reflexive skepticism about the Paralympics, built on the concession that disabled people can’t compete on a level playing field with the world’s top athletes. However, such events show that disabled people are instilled with the same spirit of competition. The joy and simple satisfaction that participants display undercut my purist objections. Moreover, by definition, most of the world can’t compete at the top level, while a fine athlete in one sport might be mediocre at another. A star basketball player is unlikely to excel at baseball. Ask Michael Jordan. In fact, there are some sports in which blind people can compete on more or less equal terms: wrestling is one, as depicted in Robert Russell’s autobiography, To Catch an Angel (1962). Another is dragon boat competition, where vision might give an advantage, but one that is surmountable.
What else might explain my discomfort? There is a significant difference between overcoming disability and other kinds of accomplishment. We admire people who achieve in some extraordinary way: a movie star, an astronaut, an accomplished violinist, the CEO of a corporation whose stock quadruples, a marathoner, an inventor, a firefighter, a Nobel peace prize winner. They all started out from a dream or goal and surpassed expectations. From the outset, their pursuit was voluntary—to the extent we understand volition. By contrast, when disabled people are praised, it can feel as if it’s for something about which we had no choice.
But once again, the explanation isn’t enough. When another friend who has low vision lost the hearing in one ear after removal of a tumor, I felt bad and told him I respected how he was handling the adjustment. “What choice do I have?” he retorted. I said he could have withdrawn into his own world. Instead, he went right back to work and resumed life as usual. What I said to him was no different from what Anita wrote in her email. In short, I’m just as prone both to feel sympathy and to respect how others manage with their disabilities.
Another thought. Praise for accomplishments in spite of disability separates people with obvious disabilities from those without any. Yet this sense of apartness is hardly unique to disabled people. Admiration for a famous actress or returning astronaut can prevent us from accepting them on their own terms. When we admire someone, we convert them into a kind of abstraction. It’s all but impossible to meet authors whose books we’ve loved or actors who have conveyed certain characters on the screen and be able to talk to them as the people they are in person.
At this point, I should allow for the possibility that I dislike having to acknowledge my disability. If true, it’s a little like someone hoping no one will bring up their blemished skin or fat ass. I can’t rule this out. The evidence is in the dilemma blind people face when applying for a job or posting on a dating website: tell people in advance that you’re blind, or wait until they meet you, when their presumed shock might be offset by your geniality, sense of humor, cleverness, or whatever. But does this quandary reflect shame about our disability or a realistic assessment of a probable reaction? I lean toward the latter.
A kinder way of thinking about this quandary is that reference to disability brings out something many of us think of as private. It might seem to compromise a well-earned sense of autonomy and the aura of independence everyone wishes to project to the world.
Since the opening of the Pompidou Center in 1977 (though it wasn’t the first such structure), it has been somewhat fashionable for buildings to display their guts. But the very fact they are the exception demonstrates our fundamental desire not to have such things in our collective face, and more importantly, the desire in many of us not to be completely known. The adjustments that disabled people make are the pipes, mortar and wires of the structures that we call our lives. For a blind person, these adjustments might include how to coordinate clothes, how to manage in the kitchen, how to get around a city when all signs are visual, how to negotiate the workplace, how to appear “normal” in a sighted world. Success with these adjustments is an achievement, yes, but it’s like an athlete’s preparation for the big event. All that preparation means nothing unless the ultimate objective is attained. For many disabled people, that objective is mainstream recognition.
Once again, this need is hardly unique to disabled people. I go back to my list of achievers. How about an astronaut? Much of the admiration will be welcome, but all the recent attention to how they handle bathroom matters? Does a successful artist in whichever medium want their stories to include all the hard work and compromises they might have made to get to where they are? How about the actress who started out in X-rated movies? An F that a college honors student is given for a course can be a source of wry amusement among fellow undergraduates, but that F will be buried when the undergraduate becomes a famous psychiatrist.
True, physical disabilities tend to be out in the open. Comedians and others who like to shock take pride in pointing out the elephant in the room. But in many situations, there are good reasons why the elephant goes unnoticed, or at least without comment. Everyone is granted degrees of privacy even in public. At the office, a man today wouldn’t dare compliment a colleague in a short skirt for her shapely legs, while only a friend would tell a man that he’s wearing his lunch on his shirt and tie. All kinds of social norms and constraints go into what we’ll say to someone, but they all reflect our respect for other people’s feelings or worry about arousing anger—a bit of both, I think. And, in recent decades, fear of legal consequences.
What this notion of privacy comes down to is the need each of us has to mold our own image. It involves a lot of behind-closed-doors activity, as everyone knows who has ever rushed to get ready for work or to host dinner guests.
Some anecdotes are in order. At my last office, a certain lawyer was justly admired for his many achievements in what had once been an obscure field. I certainly hoped for his respect. But whenever he introduced me to someone, he told them that I was his “hero.” It didn’t mean fine lawyer or anything else for which I might want to be known in that environment. It meant he admired me for how I handled my disability.
A friend in her fifties whom I’ve known for thirty years recently lost her vision and became increasingly bothered by the new attention she received as she navigated the city with a cane. One time, a woman approached her on a subway platform to tell her how pretty she looked in her black dress. This friend is no cynic and she’s usually happy to receive praise, but she felt the stranger wouldn’t have been so forthcoming had she, my friend, still been getting around without a cane. I told her she’d better get used to it because blind people are involuntary stars. We had a good laugh at that.
A short passage in my unpublished memoir describes my first memory of receiving praise I knew I didn’t deserve. Here, I am fourteen, and I’d lost my vision only a few months earlier. Coincidentally, my family had just moved to America.
As the summer waned, Dad drove us for a week’s vacation to a cabin resort a hundred miles north of Toronto. In the evening, a woman played guitar as she led the campers in sing-alongs around a fire. Ignorant of the words, I hummed the tunes.
Dad prevailed on me to try the bowling alley. Even with sight, I’d never got the hang of bowling. When I’d released the ball, it had rolled down the alley at a stately pace. Now, despite Dad’s guidance, the ball kept rolling into one or other gutter. My highest score was in the forties. I felt torn between hatred of doing something badly and wanting to do something with Dad.
I chose to believe the other vacationers were discreetly ignoring us. But at the end of the week, they awarded me the bowling prize. I was crushed. From now on would I be judged for how much I tried, not for how well I did?
The prize was a fedora. I’d worn a school cap in England, but never a real hat. With the back rim turned up, the fedora made me think of Chicago gangsters. In time I grew fond of it. It got Mum to laugh when I put it on.
Perhaps, then, the underlying reason why I resist Anita’s comment is an accumulation of compliments that imply allowances for disability. If disabled people felt that praise for how we manage is enough, we’d risk losing our motivation to prosper in mainstream society.
I’ve built an edifice of speculation on top of Anita’s compliment, and yet I still don’t really know why it troubles me. Maybe it’s just a matter of how it’s said, something like the way the words “I love you” can move but also dismay. Of course, Anita already knew about my disability and had openly and flatteringly brought it up in her email.
One of her phrases is, “I still don’t think I completely understand it all.” Put as a question, it could have been an invitation for me to leave my disability island and join her on the mainland. When I reply, I might offer to answer any questions she has. In our psychotherapy-solves-everything society, this would be standard advice. But I worry that doing so might come across as a challenge when we hardly know each other. I think I’ll give it time.
In the end, no simple answer, whether to why I hesitated at Anita’s compliment or how to handle it with grace. But my use of an island metaphor suggests that the source of my difficulty is an ingrained anxiety about apartness.
© Copyright 2015 by Adrian Spratt
I agree that you essay is a very good read. I competed athleticly on the same level with other high school athletes. I was often cut from teams but did get the opportunity to play some sports. As i got older the coaching became my athletic outlet. A brief comment on excepting complements on good work. I am a retired teacher/administrator for 33 years. I was able to recognize when I was being patrenized and would except that as it was. That did not drive me to be a better teacher I would often let it go in one ear and out the other. I enjoyed you thoughtful writing. Thank you…
I go toward humor, I lean toward sincerity, so I shall complement you shamelessly. That is, I very much like your writing, I want to say yes to all that you say, because you have listed all the feelings many of us have in this particular instance of our sometimes strange interface with the sighted world. You made me laugh and reflect. My perspective is a little different, but I recognize yours from the many blind people I have known, I’m kind of old. From an early age, I have always been blind, I have had to consider just how to feel and react to my otherness. When my sister did the explaining to other kids, when my mother got all bent out of shape, because a kid asked me about my lack of vision, when I was complemented for my skills at getting around. Those things were hard to take, but take them I did, and I still do. I used to imagine a musical that would feature a chorus line of kids, and they would each step forward in a big sort of dance number to say what they wanted the world to know about them. Now understand that this was a satire, I only cared about what the blind kid said when it came his turn, I’ve always been a little lazy about taking thoughts all the way to much of anything. So when it came this blind kid’s turn, he said, and I’m the very best at walking around. In the context of the dance number, these lines would be delivered kind of in a wrap form. I liked it, the praise blind people get that might in fact be foolish and unreal, then again, in a pecking order of blind kids, maybe he was the best, but the very best implied the world where he simply could not be the best. Well all right, what was he balancing, what tremendous concentration does it take for a blind person to get across the street versus somebody in the car on the phone, swatting kids in the back seat, let alone noticing this blind person, alarm bells! See I know we are unusual on the street and in the office. I know that someone encountering us at work, not expecting us to be a blind person goes through a mental rolla-dex, blind, oh my, looks pretty squared away, doesn’t look squared away, but hey who does he or she have to help them dress, my God those sunglasses went out five years ago. Here’s the thing, I bluff it through on my end. So they BS me, I BS them. Why do we live this way, all this messing with each other? Because we are different. We are. We do things differently, our perceptual landscape is different, our take on asthetics is affected by our not constantly putting the world through a visual filter. And guess what? I’m no better than sighted people with their filters and prejudices. When I meet a person with a different disability, I can’t help but think of them as having this disability; I mean the blind person who says they aren’t aware of another person’s racial category, come on, I say nice, romantic notion, not true though. Well so how valueable is truth in social interaction? I’d say it’s true, but we can’t expect it. People race around before dinner guests, because we want to put our best foot forward. When I cclean my house a bit before the lady who comes once a month to clean, because I want her notion of this blind guy whose wife has died to be one that says something as good as: He’s no worse than any of my other clients, better than some. The place looks fine. I stereotype her, a mom, hard working, keeping many things happening at once, doing pretty well. We are duling generalizations. It’s the way of the world. See you are describing the human condition. There is only so much anyone knows about us; we control that, except when we fall apart and everyone sees us down and out, but hopefully, only certain people see that, only when we actually are down and out. I would like to share one small thing I did that tickles me, that it came to me, that I did it. I was walking to my work place, around behind the building you know, and I became aware that someone was walking behind me, possibly following me. At a point he said, you know I’ve been watching you, and you really do very well. Adrian, I don’t know what came over me, but I said, well you know I’ve been listening to you, and I think you’re doing pretty well yourself. He thanked me. So, how deep a thinker was he? Did he say, ass hole, I was just trying to be complementary, or did he say, gee he not only did well walking around, he had the presence of mind to track how I was doing? Who knows? One time I was sitting on a commuter train here in the Bay Area, a nice sounding woman got on and said, as she sat down next to me, you look like a nice friendly person. Well thank you I said. She said, you know I have a disability too, I have M S. I said something, I don’t know, maybe something like, gee that’s a rough one. Anyway, she got off right away, we didn’t get married or anything. But she got on that train looking for someone who she thought of as nonthreatening. Hey, I wasn’t insulted. You mean you don’t think I’m just as much a male threat as any of these other guys? You mean when the men go out for the hunt, I am left behind with the women and children? Well okay, let me get to know some of these women. It’s a struggle out here. People might think we’re out of the ordinary, but if we get a chance to know people, even though they might never completely put aside our being blind, we can have fine relationships with people, the simple kind and the more complex kind. And hey, if we’re lucky enough to be good looking or if we act like we know what we’re doing, or if we seem friendly and nonthreatening, we might just get a chance to show that on balance, we might pose some differences with peoples’ other friends and acquaintances, but we’re all right. See each of my neighbors has something unusual about them too. I know these people, believe me, I might be weird, but so are they. All that primping and prepping, once we know each other, we know our quirks, we know our tendencies, what things we never quite get, what things we are fully capable of teaching. When your email friend told you you were amazing, it’s a shame to think she thought of you as great because of your hard work at overcoming what she thinks for her would be the end of the darned world. But Adrian, she’s going to think stuff like that, she just is. The woman on the train platform, of course it was because your friend was blind, but the woman who spoke to her might very well have been simply saying, this woman is the most interesting person on this platform, and I would like to be someone from this old world who speaks to her, and what better way than with a complement, besides, she looks great with her cane and her black dress. We say, I don’t want to make your day. I say, it’s okay, we are noticed, that cat you see in the corner of your eye, we are part of a landscape, we are without sight you know, I mean come on, what with the world being lovingly build without us in mind, we are a knot in the wood, an in-laid corner of a table top, an ever so slight anommoly, but it’s okay.
Your suggestion that there is no simple answer is so right! I very much agree with that assessment.
I never quite know how to take compliments on such things as academic excellence or even running an apartment decently well. I know other blind people who did and do much better. At the subsidized apartment complex where I live, several elderly neighbors — one an ex-nun — have told me I am an inspiration. They “don’t know how you do it.” I don’t do inspirational well. I don’t want to be a saint. Who would want to stand on a pedestal all day like a Byzantine or Orthodox holy person. I just wanted to have had a decent job, friends, sighted and blind, and good health. I didn’t get the job or the health. I do have some friends. And I still don’t know what to say when the compliments appear. I feel in some ways, my train went to another subway platform. I know of some blind people, one an acquaintance of mine, who work it for all it’s worth. He loves going bar hopping and getting sighted drinkers to stand him round after round. He never has to pay. No thanks.
As to my disability, I still can feel very self-conscious in groups where I am “the only blind person.” There is a bit of novelty value in braille or using my Hims Braille Sense U2 Mini (when I can get it to behave), but the novelty value easily fades and interest in me as a person can fade as well if I’m not vigilant.
There is always a bit of awkwardness when I am asked if I can sign my name on a receipt, electronic or paper. People are amazed that I can. Hello! It lingers on when printed materials are passed around at events such as a church talk or a college lecture. I have to consider how I’ll deal with sighted people talking around me at an event and knowing that if I want to engage anyone, I’ll have to just jump in, forget about the famous “eye contact” and just do it. I also have to try not to mind when sighted people mention that they might immediately after one event, rush off to another one, and I am still trying to get a ride home, brave the crazy bus, or wondering where my paratransit van is. They never understand about paratransit services. It’s not a taxi. And I no longer care if some blind people won’t use the service because they feel they should use public transportation. They don’t live my life and don’t have my health issues and aren’t usually interested in learning about them.
I could probably write more, but it’s about 5:38 a.m. CST and I should go back to bed. Thanks for the opportunity to be heard. Best