"Yes, You Can!" by Jim Stovall

I’m blind. I can’t see a thihg.

When I was 17, a normal all-American kid in Oklahoma, I went to the doctor for a routine physical. He shone a light into my eyes and sent me off for a battery of tests. The news wasn’t good: I had a degenerative eye disease and would progressively lose my sight.
It’s a devastating thing for anybody to face, much less a happy-go-lucky teenager. I had never even met a blind person. How did they act? What did they do?
As terrible as the news was, it focused my mind in a practical way. If I wanted to stay independent and make a living, college seemed a necessity. I enrolled at a local university, but it was the early 1980s and there were no facilities or arrangements for handicapped students. I always seemed to be groping around in a gray haze.
During this time, while I still had limited vision, I began volunteering at a school for blind kids. The teachers put me in charge of a four-year-old they thought was particularly difficult to deal with. They didn’t have many expectations for this little boy; because of multiple handicaps, they said he would never be able to tie his own shoes or climb stairs. I was determined to prove them wrong.
"You can tie your shoes," I told him. "You can climb stairs." The little boy was just as determined to resist. He said, "No, I can’t," and I said, "Yes, you can." We went back and forth like that constantly.
The truth was, I was having trouble saying "Yes, you can" to my own life. Keeping up with college courses was increasingly hard, and the day came when I decided to call it quits. On my way to the administration building to drop out, I went to the school for blind kids and announced I wouldn’t be volunteering anymore either. "It’s too tough," I said. "I can’t do it."
"Yes, you can!" a little voice piped up beside me. The four-year-old had been listening.
"No, I can’t!" I said sharply.
"Yes, you can!"
Then it hit me. I had to keep on trying or admit I had been lying to this kid that the extra effort was worth it. And in that second I knew: It was worth it — for him, and for me.
I resumed college, listening even more attentively as other students read my assignments aloud. One of the sounds that kept me going was the gentle voice of a young woman named Crystal, who read to me patiently week after week. Three and a half years later I graduated. That same week I stood by as the little boy who had said "No, I can’t" climbed three flights of stairs by himself, sat on the top step and tied his shoes.

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