Life is what happened while Ian White was making other plans. Diagnosed with congenital glaucoma at six months of age, he had experimental surgery and it saved his sight. He wore glasses from the age of 2, which gave him vision well into adulthood. Although he hated wearing them as a kid and found plenty of innovative ways to ditch his glasses including burying them in his sandbox, they did what they were supposed to.
 

Graduating from the University of Guelph and Ryerson, White had a high profile career in corporate interior design, and, as a senior project manager, he worked on some of Toronto’s most important buildings. He married the love of his life, Marla Schwisberg and they moved to their dream home where they raised their daughter, Rachel, 17.

Life was just as he’d planned, but it changed in 2001, when White began developing cataracts and painful blisters.

With every eye surgery, White’s hope grew only to be dashed when it failed, changing his plans “and changing who I am,” he said. “We are what we do, or can do or want to do. When you have a disability, you lose sense of who you are.

“I went from being a successful man in a career I loved to suddenly not knowing what the future would hold . . . not knowing how life would go forward ,” White said, sitting in the comfortable living room of the Bloor West Village home he shares with his wife Marla and daughter. His family has been his rock.

Unfortunately, the vision-saving surgery he had as an infant also damaged his eyes. He wasn’t a good candidate for further operations. Besides, they may not have worked and he didn’t want to put his family through the emotionally painful process.

Life changed again in 2004 when White decided he had to move forward “even if it meant I had to be a blind guy, to have no sight, I knew I had to get off this crazy roller-coaster.”

That’s when he contacted the CNIB to learn how to get on being blind in the left eye and extremely blurry with patches of light and dark in the right.

An independent living specialist at CNIB helped him take the first steps with orientation and mobility. He also received his first cane which got him out of the house. A computer with the right software “reconnected me to the world,” White says. He learned to measure water before boiling it and not after. As important, he met others facing the same challenges. It was liberating.

“Home had been a safe shell; comfortable, yet claustrophobic,” he said.

CNIB opened up a new, fulfilling life. These days, White is at the University of Toronto studying philosophy and on the dean’s list. “I never imagined that could happen.”

White is making plans as a volunteer with CNIB’s New Beginnings program “helping those who are struggling the way I was 10 years ago.”

Just knowing they’re not alone and sharing challenges and solutions is life-changing, he says. “To be in a room with others who know what it feels like is incredibly empowering,” he added.

So is getting past the grieving for a lost future. “If you have supports in place, you can do anything. The only way to find out is to keep trying.”

New Beginnings has also lead to the establishment of the Visionaries, an organization he helped set up to bring people together every month and keep them connected.

It’s been a difficult journey for White but he’s in a good place. And along the way, he’s met people who have made him stronger: musicians, sculptors, performance artists and a team of blind hockey players.

“It’s inspiring to meet people who surpass what you could have done sighted,” he said.

And without CNIB? “I would be a lonely, reclusive, under-utilized person,” White said. “I’d be living in a cage. I would be bound by these four walls. My life would be immeasurably impoverished. What I have learned over the last five or 10 years has enabled me to do anything I want.
 

“I feel like a phoenix rising from the ashes of my former self. The way I defined myself prior to blindness has burned away.”

Source: The Star