Dining in the Dark Is Not Blindness
For years I’ve been rather rude about Dining in the Dark events.
My argument was simple: they don’t teach you what it’s like to be blind.
And I still think that’s true.
Tie a blindfold on a sighted person for an evening and what you’ve simulated is not blindness. You’ve simulated a sighted person suddenly losing their sight. The confusion, the anxiety, the frustration, the feeling of being wrong-footed by a world that no longer behaves as expected. Blindness itself is not an evening of panic. It’s a life. A skill set. A body and mind that have adapted and learned.
But I wonder whether I may have been arguing with the wrong proposition.
Perhaps Dining in the Dark was never really teaching blindness at all.
Perhaps what it teaches is what it feels like to go blind.
That is a very different thing.
As a blind person, I sometimes forget that sight loss is frightening. Not blindness itself, but the transition. The moment when the assumptions you’ve relied on stop working. The moment when confidence deserts you and the world suddenly feels uncertain.
A sighted person in a dark restaurant is not learning my life. They are learning something about their dependence on sight.
The problem comes if they leave believing the experience has taught them what it is like to be blind.
It hasn’t.
What it may have taught them is what it would feel like for them to lose their sight tomorrow.
That’s still a real experience. It’s just a different one.
So, I find myself in an unusual position. I still don’t think Dining in the Dark teaches blindness. I still don’t think a few hours of simulated impairment creates understanding.
But I now think it may reveal something genuine: not the destination, but the shock of the journey.
Which raises a rather uncomfortable question.
If what we’re really showing people is the fear of losing sight rather than the reality of living without it, are we building understanding?
Or are we raising money by frightening people?
I’m honestly not sure.
But I am no longer sure the distinction between being blind and going blind is clear in these sorts of events.
Note: 40 years ago, I went to bed as a teenager with normal vision. When I woke up, I was a blind teenager…