In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment to highlight the strangeness of quantum physics. He imagined a box, inside of which was a cat. Also in the box was a radioactive atom, which was being monitored by a Geiger counter. The Geiger counter was connected to a hammer which would crush a vial of cyanide, sealing the cat’s doom, if the radioactive atom decayed. All of these things would be sealed inside the box. According to the most popular interpretation of quantum physics, until someone re-opened the box and observed the state of the experiment, the cat would be in the surreal state of being dead and alive at the same time. This is because no information about the radioactive atom’s state could be ascertained without opening the box or at least observing the atom in some way. Radioactive decay is a quantum mechanical phenomenon, and the cat’s fate was bound up with the atom’s quantum state. From outside the box, the cat could only be thought of as both dead and alive until the box was opened and the quantum state of the atom in the experiment was forced to collapse into either having decayed or not: if it had, the cat was a goner, and if not, it would be safe. In my life, I have known this odd, surreal state of seeming to be somewhere between two mutually exclusive worlds, which is where the title of this blog comes from.
I happen to be legally blind. However, my vision is right on the edge between legal blindness in the US and simply being visually impaired. I started school as a member of the first generation of kids to attend mainstream public schools with disabilities. Previously, visually impaired children went to special schools for the blind. Because of this, I was in a kind of no-man’s land. I wasn’t a part of the blind world, but wasn’t accepted in the sighted world, either. Sports were a disaster for me at school, as I could crush any disabled kids in all-disabled sporting events, but would in turn be crushed by the able-bodied kids. Needless to say, neither crushing nor being crushed was much fun. As dealing with disabled students in a mainstream public school was new at the time, teachers sometimes treated me as if I not only couldn’t see, but couldn’t learn, and even mocked me in front of their classes. For example, one teacher said that I was a living example of original sin because of my vision impairment in front of her class at a private Christian school. The large print books I needed at the time could arrive months after the school year started, which didn’t help things for me academically. To confuse the teachers even further, in the second grade I was given an IQ test, probably to catch any possible learning disabilities. To everyone’s surprise, it found that my IQ was in the top 1% of the population. I also began to discover that art was among the things I enjoyed, despite my vision. So there I was, as a child, neither sighted nor blind: a disabled, gifted child with visual hobbies, full of contradictions.
Several major changes were on the way for me as my teen years approached. One of these was that when I was in the 8th grade, contact lens technology finally reached the point where I could use contact lenses instead of the two-inch thick and painfully heavy glasses that were the bane of my existence throughout elementary school, and the relentless teasing about the glasses stopped. Several years earlier, I received a computer as a gift from a friend of my father’s and learned to program after becoming fascinated with video games during the first gaming golden age, lured in by Pac-man and other games from that era. Puberty brought another major surprise. As the years went by, I began to notice that my classmates were veraciously devouring pictures of nude women from purloined Playboys, but these left me cold. Seeing some of my male classmates shirtless, on the other hand, was another thing entirely. Realizing I was gay was problematic, as I was growing up in the South in a fairly religious home, with my father being a minister. Because of my sexuality and my legal blindness, I spent the rest of high school trying to blend in to the background and be as inconspicuous as a ghost. This kept me out of the way of any bullies, but made my high school years incredibly lonely and forgettable.
College, however, was a very different experience. I began to be recognized for my intelligence and abilities as a programmer, and also managed to become something of a big man on campus. I was always a member of the student senate, and strived to be elected to the vice presidency of campus organizations such as the Residence Hall Association, since being vice president didn’t require much work but often did come with a stipend. I also finally developed a small but loyal network of friends, and due to my position on campus even experienced something like fame. I would say that my college experience was as close to perfect as life has been for me, but I was still too scared in the mid 1990s to search for a boyfriend or even an occasional date. If I had known how to navigate the world as a gay man, this period of my life would have been essentially perfect. However, I was still living in the gray-zone, a no-man’s-land between two worlds.
After I graduated college, I moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft, which was then the most important technology company in the world. I discovered two important things about myself at Microsoft. First, I was not the smartest person in the world, not by a long shot. I had finally encountered a place where I was a small fish in a big pond intellectually. Secondly, though, sometimes I could have a real impact on the world by bringing my perspective as a low-vision person to bare. For example, there was a flaw in Windows that I arranged to have corrected where the text would be garbled on a dialog box if a very large font was used as the main system font. I discovered this problem because I used these very large fonts to see my computer’s screen. After the problem was resolved, the code fixing it ended up in several hundred million copies of Windows, so I was definitely having a small, but genuine, impact on the world.
I also began to take tentative steps towards living an authentic life as a gay man. I came out at Microsoft, and had my first tentative gay experiences as well as my first long term relationship with a man in Seattle. I was slowly beginning to bring the pieces of my life together, from a surreal superposition to a coherent whole that made sense. After spending seven years at Microsoft, I decided that I wanted to make a larger contribution with my working life to things that I felt were more meaningful. This led me to move to Vermont to work for AI Squared, the world’s leader at the time in magnification software for low-vison people. This was by far the most rewarding part of my career so far. I was able to make a dramatic difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of visually impaired people, in many cases allowing them to live and work independently, through the software I was helping to develop. I was a leader in the company as the director of Quality Assurance, and met some of the most accomplished disabled people in the country. Among the people I met on a work-related fact-finding mission was the man who I would eventually marry. I’m now living with him in Chicago, having long since come out to everyone about my sexual orientation. While coming out wasn’t easy, I had more positive reactions than negative ones. I still have moments of alienation and ennui, where I feel like a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit. However, I’ve come a long way in learning not only to accept my uniqueness, but also even to use it to my advantage and to benefit the world at large.
Now that I’ve introduced myself and given you a good idea of my background, I can get back to the blog. The contents of this blog will mainly be about things that interest me: Science, technology, disability and gay issues, and, occasionally politics. I do not hold myself out as an expert in any of these subjects, and will provide links to more authoritative sources when writing about issues that don’t directly pertain to my life. In any event, in writing this blog I hope to learn more about the subjects I care about by sharing what I learn about them with others, and to have an influence in how the world perceives and treats disabled people. I hope you’ll join me.
Visions From Schrödinger's Box 