A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

The sense of standing in isolation, opposed to the outside world of people and things, and of
being inwardly separated from what exists „outside‟ is experienced as being self-evident and
natural (Elias, 2001:114).
Roshni is eloquent in her description of the frustration she felt at the experience of missing
out on many life events that teenagers might usually expect to come their way. While
Roshni‟s anger expressed here is actually at having had nobody to talk with to make sense of
her experience of blindness, its cause was experienced as being within herself.
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Certainly when I went through my teenage years… I experienced a lot of anger and
resentment… and I really wanted to let that anger out, and I really wanted to talk
about the fact that I can‟t see, and this is fucking shit, and this is awful… this is
really crap… I can‟t do so many things, I can‟t do the things everyone around me is
doing… I‟m not pulling guys the way my friends are, I‟m not drinking behind my
parents‟ backs, I‟m not… there are so many things I‟m not doing, and this is why
I‟m not doing them… and I don‟t like me, and I don‟t like life… but you can‟t say
that within your family environment, and you can‟t… you can‟t say that to your
sighted friends, cos they don‟t get it either… and you don‟t, certainly at that time, I
didn‟t find a lot of affinity with my visually impaired friends, either… because most
of them had some degree of vision, and their experience was very different from
mine… erm… and of those who were totally blind (sighs…) I found them to be…
they didn‟t have a lot of the aspirations I had, anyway, so they were quite happy
playing with fuzzy felt and going to Blind Club… (l.1.384ff.)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty reflects that:
Consciousness holds itself responsible for everything, and takes everything upon
itself, but it has nothing of its own and makes its life in the world (Merleau-Ponty,
2008:526).
While the structures that pattern experience cannot be seen their effects can still be felt. In
the situation she describes above Roshni shoulders herself the blame for her situation.
Deborah Lupton suggests that emotionality locates the individual within the world of social
interactions. Emotions cannot be experienced without the real or imagined presence of
others: