The most annoying thing about being blind is that you don’t find shortcuts. Because you don’t have any. You either learn things the hard way or fall by the wayside, which is not an option…not at least for me.

My mind returns to the present. The laptop with the glowing screen on the table, fingers hovering over the keys to translate the precise thought that forms in my head, the headset that allows me to understand what’s on the screen, as a way of compensating for my blinded eyes.

This has been the way I sit before the PC or laptop for twenty-five years now. Only difference is that I have a screen reader software which I didn’t have in 1997. Someone gave me a 486 system, the most basic machine you’d find those days with Windows 95 crawling in its RAM like an earthworm wriggling out of the soil. I then began freelancing for newspapers and bought a Celeron system on an installment basis. I couldn’t afford the screen reader back then, which meant I had to remember the steps to open the MS Word programme and type what’s in my mind. The only luxury I had was familiarity with the QWERTY keyboard, which I learnt by practicing typing on an unyieldingly hard and rusty Remington machine.

For all practical purposes, it never felt different without a screen reader; the only crucial difference is that you’re absolutely clueless about what you’re doing. You’ve to assume that when you press the windows key plus R and type winword, the empty word document would open and then you’d type into it. The problem with that process was that you wouldn’t know if a dialogue box had opened and if you should press escape key to continue typing. Working the keys with the dialogue box on would mean you won’t have even a word typed in.

Sometimes, I’d finish typing 700 words or more and then would learn that not a single word I typed was on the screen. And I’d be lucky if I failed to get the article on the word doc the second time. My city was prone to power failures and, despite the wonder machine called Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) that was supposed to keep the machine on until you shut it down, the system would die even before I could save the file.

I’d be lying if I say that it didn’t frustrate me. But I guess I was mentally prepared to type the whole article one more time and mentally compose the lines, realizing, to my delight, that I was refining the sentences even as they formed. And therefore, when I got the typing process right, I’d see the article in its complete state with perfect sentences, just the way I wanted it.

And, in these twenty-five years, I’d get inside a building for the first time, not knowing if I should walk straight or turn. My white cane would hit and rattle a table with decorative articles and I’d sometimes end up hugging a bonsai plant, missing the turn to the left. If I felt embarrassed in the early days, I realized that people who designed the space must be far more embarrassed because of their obvious ignorance about accessible indoor spaces.

I’ve accessed perhaps the most challenging spaces you could imagine because quitting wasn’t a choice; quitting was never a choice. People like me try, lose, sometimes even fall face-down, get up, brush off and move on.

More often than not, those of us with disability fail. But it’s a good thing because when we’re failing, we’re still in the game. We know we’ll get another chance to try, with better preparation, more information and bolstered confidence. There’s nothing better to do. So we try. And for all that trying, we become better at a skill or a life hack.

What I’ve described isn’t unique to disabled people. If I don’t believe that, I won’t be writing this blog.

As human beings, we all have this almost magical ability to learn and get better. But the most important qualification to enter the University of Adversity is a stronger gut for failure.

Most of us are afraid of failure. We’re worried that it exposes us as imposters or incompetent. But the reality is that we fail regularly and only by failing we get better at something. I read somewhere that Michael Jordan failed nine thousand shots, lost three-hundred games and missed out on twenty-three winning shots before becoming the most successful NBA star ever.

What stops us from realizing our dream is fear…that we’re not good enough and we can never be like someone else.

Get rid of this fear and you’ll be unstoppable.