I am meant to Feel, not just See: A Prelude to Confronting my Ocularcentric Self
By Tochi Chisom-Nwosu
Every time I opened my notes app, I would scroll past a line I wrote about four months ago:
“We are not meant to see but feel”
I often let the words escape me, thinking that they were an abstract thought from a moment of inspiration, but they were not. They were a personal confession I had yet to realise.
I have come to see that I have tied much of my self-identity to how I look. But I don’t fault myself for this. I’ve grown up in a culture where people treat sight as their most valued sense. This dominance of the visual, ocularcentrism, is the prioritisation of sight as the primary way of knowing. In this framework, the self becomes anchored to appearance. Despite this cultural shaping, I am frustrated with how dependent my self-esteem has become on how I look and how I’m visually perceived by myself and others.
Thus, I am trying to step out of that bubble and lean into more relational ways of constructing the self. Recently, I have turned to the accounts of blind individuals and to traditions of storytelling as ways of cultivating personhood beyond the visual. This piece is an act of recognition and a marker of the beginning of my journey of decentering- a prelude. Also, it is a way of relating ideas of the self through experiences within and beyond me. Through this, I hope to gain new insights I can bring into my own life.
Reading Schillmeier’s critique of how blindness has been historically framed as ignorance helped me recognise why it feels foreign, but still important, to imagine forms of self-worth that aren’t rooted in how I look. Of course, I can never fully bracket my experience as a sighted person: imagining blindness is constructed through my knowledge of sight. This affects how I can interpret the insights that blind individuals offer, but it does not lessen the value of what I can learn.
With this in mind, a source that opened me to a new perspective was watching videos by Tommy Edison, an individual who has been blind since birth. He answers questions about living without sight and explains how he navigates the world. What stood out to me is a sense of self that is grounded in a two-fold idea of feeling:
Firstly, in how the body physically feels in space. I have taken this as a reminder to be mindful of not only how I move through space, but what I physically put myself through in the name of beauty. Popular culture and societal pressures often reinforce the idea that looking good is worth discomfort, that ‘pretty hurts’ (shout out Beyoncé!). Lately, I have started to question the small ways this shows up in my own routine. For example, choosing restrictive clothes that ‘present me well’ instead of clothes I’m most comfortable in. It’s small, but questioning these decisions helps me recenter how I feel in my body and prioritise that feeling.
Secondly, Edison touched upon emotional feelings. A direct statement from him that stuck with me was, “You’re beautiful to me if we get along.” This shows that self-identity is, ironically, beyond the self; it is relational. My self-identity should be strengthened by how I relate with other people, which in turn will shape how I experience myself.
This realisation reminded me of my childhood. My parents used to tell my siblings and me bedtime stories, and one I particularly remember is the Nigerian tale How the Tortoise Got the Cracks on His Shell.
In the story, the tortoise tricks a group of birds into helping him attend a heavenly feast, where he selfishly eats all the food. In anger, the birds take back their feathers, causing him to fall from the sky and crack his shell. Even though the story explains a visible feature, the cracks, they matter as a consequence of the tortoise’s actions and character, not as a comment on his appearance. Upon reflecting on other stories, I realised the characters were defined by what they did and hardly by what they looked like. Part of this is because these stories were meant to carry moral lessons, but another part is simply that appearance was irrelevant! Who should care what someone looks like if their character is good or bad? This reminder of my childhood made me reflective. I’ve known since I was young that a person’s core is the content of their character, so why did I forget?
So then, this brings me back to why this piece exists. I’m not trying to make any groundbreaking claims; this is an act of remembrance, tying the early lessons from childhood to the new perspectives I gain from stories of blind individuals.
I am learning to feel, feel for who I am beyond sight. That is the only way I can be whole.
References
Anike Foundation 2021. How the tortoise got the cracks on his shell: a Nigerian folktale. Anike Foundation (available online: https://anikefoundation.org/african-folktales/how-the-tortoise-got-the-cracks-on-his-shell, accessed ).
Brook, I. 2002. Experiencing interiors: ocularcentrism and Merleau-Ponty’s redeeming of the role of vision. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 33, 68–77.
Edison, T. 2026. The Tommy Edison Experience. YouTube (available online: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCld5SlwHrXgAYRE83WJOPCw, accessed 17 January 2026).
Enoch, J. L., Jones, & L. McDonald, 2020. Thinking about sight as a sense. Optometry in Practice 21, 2–9 (available online: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/24967, accessed 3 September 2024).
Knowles-Carter, B. 2014. Beyoncé - Pretty Hurts (available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXXQLa-5n5w, accessed ).
Schillmeier, M. 2006. Othering blindness – on modern epistemological politics. Disability & Society 21, 471–484.