There’s a particular kind of tiredness that comes from having to explain your existence over and over again. It’s not the tiredness of a long day or a late night. It’s the heaviness that settles in your chest when you realise—again—that the world still expects you to be the teacher, even in moments when you’re the one who needs support.

For many blind people, this happens in places where you’d hope it wouldn’t: hospitals, clinics, emergency departments. You arrive needing care, but before anyone even asks what’s wrong, you’re already fielding questions about how much you can see, whether you can read the forms, whether you “want a wheelchair,” or whether someone should “guide you by the arm like this.” You’re suddenly responsible for correcting unsafe guiding, explaining that blindness isn’t a spectrum of “a bit blurry,” and reminding trained professionals that disability doesn’t erase your autonomy.

It’s not that people are malicious. It’s that the baseline expectation is that you will educate them. Every time. Even when you’re in pain. Even when you’re frightened. Even when you’ve already delivered hundreds of disability responsiveness workshops to medical staff who should know better by now.

There’s a moment—quiet, internal—when you think: Why am I still having to say this? Why hasn’t this sunk in? And that moment hurts more than the awkward questions or the clumsy guiding. It’s the realisation that your lived experience, your expertise, your training, your voice… somehow still hasn’t shifted the system enough for you to simply be a patient instead of a teaching opportunity.

The frustration builds not because people are curious, but because the burden is always on you. You’re the one who has to correct the nurse who grabs your arm without asking. You’re the one who has to explain that “just follow me” is meaningless when you can’t see where they’re pointing. You’re the one who has to reassure them that blindness doesn’t make you fragile, helpless, or inspirational—it just makes you blind.

And underneath all of it is the quiet wish that, just once, you could walk into a medical setting and be treated as someone who belongs there without needing to justify or explain your body. That your presence wouldn’t trigger confusion or assumptions. That the training you’ve poured into the system would show up in the way people interact with you.

It’s not about wanting special treatment. It’s about wanting ordinary treatment—competent, respectful, informed. The kind of treatment sighted people take for granted.

The emotional labour of constantly educating others is invisible, but it accumulates. It’s the weight of every conversation where you’ve had to correct someone gently so they don’t feel embarrassed. It’s the mental calculation of whether you have the energy to explain something again, or whether you’ll just let it slide this time. It’s the knowledge that if you don’t speak up, the next blind person will face the same ignorance.

And that’s the hardest part: knowing that your silence might make someone else’s experience worse, so you keep teaching even when you’re exhausted. You keep advocating even when you shouldn’t have to. You keep explaining because the alternative is letting the system stay exactly as it is.

There’s strength in that, yes. But there’s also grief. Grief for the energy spent, the moments lost, the care you didn’t receive because you were too busy educating the people who were supposed to be helping you.

And yet, you keep going—not because you want to be an inspiration, but because you deserve a world where you don’t have to be one.