Cleanliness Through My Eyes

This post is not to brag on myself, I know that sighted people sometimes wonder how blind people do things and they may hesitate to ask for fear of offending or belittling a blind or visually impaired individual. For most people cleanliness tasks are part of every day life and everyone has different levels of how much or how often they clean themselves and their environments such as home, car, work area/office or get away cabin or cottage. In the blind and sighted impaired community we also have different levels of how often we clean using our other senses to help us. I'm unable to look around and take in my surroundings in order to spot spills, smudges or dirt but I know that they are a part of life and know that they need to be tended to. I try to keep track of what chores I did and when if they are things that don't need cleaning every day, though your head is not always the best place to store info or reminders especially when you start getting older. But for the most part it helps. My sense of smell and touch help me identify much of the things that may need cleaning like, the garbage feels super full time to take it out, or the floor under my feet feels a little sandy guess it's time to run the vacuum. Many who are blind or sighted impaired like things to be clean and neat the same as our sighted friends and family and we do our best to achieve our tasks. Besides learning from family and friends like most sighted people, there are training centers and programs to help blind and sighted impaired individuals learn how to do a variety of cleaning tasks for life management in ways that work best for us. Everything from making a bed, to doing laundry to cooking on the stove if people feel comfortable with that. I use my memory quite a bit like I vacuum each room in sections starting from one end and work my way to the other end. I memorize what different cleaning products feel like since most of them we use are all different. Blind and visually impaired people like to look neat also when they are out in public. We definitely won't hesitate to ask assistance or opinions of sighted loved ones and people we can trust to tell us what they think of a specific clothing choice, certain shoes or something we did with our hair. We like making ourselves look nice and it feels good to get compliments because we can't just look at ourselves in the mirror so feedback is appreciated both good and bad. Cleanliness and neatness are desired and put into practice for those of us with sight loss or blind we just approach these areas differently. Music is very motivating as well as knowing that if they are a part of one's life, that our fur babies and other family or friends have clean environments. And we get to be a part of that.