Cassandra finds her way around with the aid of a collapsible walking stick.

You may have heard the expression “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, but is that really true? What comes to mind when you see a blind person walking down the street? According to most people I ask, they tell me they either feel pity or admiration.

It totally shocked me once when I heard a few aunties behind me in the MRT whispering: “Poor thing, they have to live in a home… People have to bath and feed them.”

On the other side of the spectrum, there are also those that look upon people like me as demi-gods for they think our ability to do the simple things in life as extraordinary. The daily little things I enjoy doing for my family and myself like surf the net, cook, bake, and even make-up seem so wondrous to them.

But to me, it’s just doing things a little different from others to get the same end result. Having passion for the things I do drives me in life.

I love to surf the net; technology is such an amusement for me. With the aid of my speech-software, I am able to use a regular computer. My speed-reading of audio messages on my Mobile phone or laptop often amazes sighted friends. But really, all of us can do the same. The sighted speed read with their eyes; I just do it with my ears. It’s not like I have supernatural hearing abilities, it’s just that I depend on my hearing more than the sighted folks and got better at it over time.

Blinded from the age of eight from a degenerative eye condition called Stargardts. People often think I face many more life challenges than the usual man on the street.

Dinner time - Cassandra makes it a point to feed her daughter, Kady, personally.

But the reality is that I am just an ordinary girl with bigger dreams and a lot of resilience. I am not only a mom to my beautiful angel and a street busker, I am also studying to be a counsellor.

Always look on the bright side. Keep on the sunny side.

Lyrics like these hold more than a grain of truth for me. For the last eight years, I have been singing on the streets of Singapore.

For me, busking is a fun job with flexible hours. One of the most memorable things that happened during one of my busking sessions was when a foreign sounding guy followed me to the taxi stand after I ended the session and talked to me all the way. The flipper was when he asked: “May I have your hand in marriage?” Up to today I thank my lucky stars that just at that moment a taxi pulled up and I jumped in without answering!

However, not everyday is filled with such colorful events. On another occasion, tourists requesting song after song of which titles I never heard of before surrounded me. Good thing was that at about the 10th foreign-sounding song requests, I hear “Yue Liang Dai Biao Wo De Xin.” A busker’s staple.

I don’t find any additional challenge being a visually impaired busker. My job scope is the same as others in my line of work. I perform, brighten up the day of passer-bys, and put a smile on their faces. Sight is not a requisite to do my job well. Moreover, I am thankful to have many blind ambassadors in the music industry that lead the way for people like me to be acceptable.

One of my beliefs is to never give up; tiny successes always lead to bigger ones.

When I was a teenager I always had dreams to do something in the helping profession, but what was a blind girl to do? Not a doctor, not a nurse or a vet as I would have liked, so I put aside my dreams in my 20s and chose to have fun and do the things that swept me off my feet such as getting married, showing dogs and singing.

In recent years, however, the dreams started haunting my nights again. The little voice inside my head kept asking: “Where’s the girl that wanted to do good?”

“Oh, but I have been out of school for over 10 years by now and have so much on my plate, having a little girl of my own, doing the nine to five. Where was I to begin?,” I thought.

But on my 30th birthday, I spent the entire day ransacking my storeroom looking for the coveted box containing all my papers and report cards from my school days.

When I finally found the result slip I so casually put away 10 years ago I nearly fainted, what or rather where was I to go looking for a second career with such poor results?

Returning to school after a decade, Cassandra hopes to touch lives with her acquired skills.

But I did not give up then. I decided then to start from taking the TOEFL and lucky for me, I did rather well. Next up was to look for a university to study counseling, for I have decided that my life journey was incomplete until I entered the helping profession and what better way than becoming a counsellor?

Starry-eyed with my TOEFL results, I approached all the top universities offering counselling programmes, but the first few slammed their doors on me. One even told me: “Sorry but if you have a visual problem, we don’t want you even if we don’t have to do anything extra to help. Go somewhere else!”

Still, I refused to give up – the same resilience, or some might say stubbornness, egged me on.

Finally, I chanced upon an obscure website offering a Masters in professional counseling with a university in Australia and I called them. Although the school is not very well known and I have to travel from west to east to get to school, I jumped in without a moment’s hesitation. And now I’m doing my Graduate Diploma in Counselling.

When I complete my Masters, I intend to make my dream of helping others come true. I would advise all to get employed doing the thing they love best, for I believe when one’s work is her passion, it is no longer work.

My vision is to be able to help people who have lost the ability to see in the height of their life. I would love to hold their hand and walk with them, helping them find the resilience to come back and join the rest of us. I would like them to feel  “What a wonderful world we live in!” and help them see the pretty colors of the rainbow in the night. There is still so much to live for even when ability is taken away from us. I wish to rub off if only a little of the resilience inside of me to touch these people in limbo land.

To end off, I wish to share a verse of my favorite song by Dianna Ross, in times when I feel beaten, singing this beautiful song renews my strength.

“Live believing
Dreams are for weaving
Wonders are waiting to start
Live your story
Faith hope and glory
Hold to the truth
In your heart…”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Conversation, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.