The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,16

me and a bunch of locals through the mountains of Gansu Province.

I discovered that year that traveling, and traveling alone especially, made me confront my visual disability as nothing else could. It’s hard for me to explain how I see the world, in part because I don’t know any other way of seeing. I can only explain my vision in clinical terms. I measure 20/200 out of my right eye with corrective lenses and 20/300 out of my left eye with corrective lenses, meaning that what a person with 20/20 vision can see at 200 or 300 feet, respectively, I need to be at 20 feet to see. In addition to that, my left eye muscle is so weak that I almost never use it. Both measurements qualify me as “legally blind,” which I suppose means that I can comfortably say that I have a disability that must be accommodated in accordance with the law. These numbers don’t take into account my impairment with respect to reading and seeing things close at hand. Fonts smaller than 10 points are a challenge, and even with a 10-point font, reading can be a slow process without a magnifying glass. This is how I’ve seen the world since I was four years old. These are the limitations that I confront on a daily basis, but nothing—absolutely nothing—makes those limitations more real, immediate, or frustrating than when I travel alone, when there’s no one I know to lean on, in a strange place where I can’t speak the language.

Traveling alone was the single most effective and grueling test I could put myself through, emotionally, mentally, and physically, to prove to myself that I could do as much as anyone else could. As I traipsed through the hidden back alleys of China’s ancient cities and the winding medieval streets of Florence, and the unfriendly boulevards of post-Communist Budapest, searching for a youth hostel, tea house, or museum, frustrated and angry at my inability to see the numbers on buildings and read the names of businesses, I learned to control the frustration and the rage at my physical limitations. I had no choice but to find my way, for no one was there to help me. I tapped into reserves of courage and resourcefulness that I would have never known existed but for the fact that I had consciously and willingly put myself into such trying circumstances. I learned to communicate with strangers with few words, with gestures and body language. I learned to gauge the four corners of a compass by the position of the sun. I learned to stay calm, to be patient with myself, to allow myself to make wrong turns. And when I finally made it to the majesty of the Sistine Chapel and stood within the ruins of the Forum, as much as I appreciated what I was seeing, I was more grateful for my own abilities. The sense of accomplishment in knowing that I had reached my destination by my own doing was always the greatest high I could ever imagine finding—pride in my own emotional wherewithal, my own problem-solving capabilities, my own body’s capacity to carry thirty pounds on my back for hours on end up and down stairs and mountains. In the greatest of ironies, traveling alone made me feel whole and complete inside; it helped to heal my anguished soul, which for so long had been obsessed with the metaphysical questions.

Part of the sense of feeling whole and complete came from the joy of meeting all the new people along the way. It was only when I traveled alone that I was truly open to meeting people and to learning everything they had to teach me about their worldview. There was also a tantalizing freedom in encountering those who knew nothing about me. Much in the same way a guy will spill his guts to a bartender, I found myself confiding in strangers about what ailed me. In these strangers’ eyes, I stopped being the invalid I’d always known myself to be and I could re-create myself, transform myself into someone brave and smart and funny and engaging. I’ll never forget the mysterious Swedish girl in Paris with a broken back, traveling alone in a wheelchair, with whom I shared a hostel room for one night; she told me that I was worthy of love—I know how cheesy that sounds, but that kind of sentiment is most welcome when you’re traveling around the world on