It feels like hundreds of years since I have visited my own blog.  My bones should have become brittle and my hair stark white.  I will forever be in the waiting game, but this time, I return to this blog having been immersed in a different kind of writing and not simply buried under a rock.  I needed to step away from prose and wash myself again in the fragrance of poetry.  I have always been a poet, a writer, but for years I wasn’t writing.  I  struggled to stay afloat while trying to figure out how to be a disabled person.  I had no job, therefore I felt I had no value.

I began to define myself as a disabled person who couldn’t contribute and forgot that I exist beyond my blindness.  I allowed RP to steal my voice as well as my vision.  After my diagnosis, I dove into the darkness and forgot about all the light that remained; I immersed myself in the task of becoming a blind person and forgot to pay attention to my pulse and my dreams.

I remember being in a workshop at one of my former jobs where we were asked to list words to define ourselves.  If I had been asked to do that after I stopped working, I know the first word on my list would have been blind. Now, although blind will always be on the list, it no longer stands alone.  I am wife, writer, friend, daughter, pug fanatic, and going blind.