Much of what I do began with learning how to find out what I could not see.
Growing up blind, I learned that a good question could make the world more understandable and give me more ways to participate. On my grandmother’s farm, I could be part of many things if I could explain what I wanted to do, listen carefully and ask for the right assistance.
Learning to use a white cane added another lesson. An unfamiliar journey becomes more manageable when I attend to the next step, use the information available and adjust as I go. A process can give us enough confidence to begin while leaving room to learn along the way.
Those experiences still shape how I think about independence. We all depend on tools, relationships and arrangements that make action possible. The important question is whether they help us understand our options and have a meaningful say in what happens next.
Finding a direction through learning
My own direction took time to emerge. At seventeen, I worked hard enough to earn a place in law and then realised I was not sure I wanted it. I deferred university, trained as a massage therapist and began studying guitar. Meaningful work and music gave me different ways to learn about myself.
When I did go to university, my interests ranged across music, history and politics. Eventually, teaching gave that curiosity a practical purpose: helping other people make sense of difficult ideas and use what they learned.
I taught at the University of Adelaide for 19 years. I wanted students to leave with better questions, stronger judgement and the confidence to keep learning when the course was over. I remain grateful to the teachers who helped me develop those qualities, and to the students who kept giving me reasons to improve.
Bringing understanding into everyday work
That interest in learning now connects my work in analysis, consulting, communication and business development. I enjoy finding relationships between ideas, but the test is what those relationships help someone understand or do.
A strategy needs to account for the people expected to make it work. A message needs to make sense to the person receiving it. And a difficult conversation needs enough curiosity for people to discover something they did not know at the beginning.
Being blind keeps these concerns close to everyday life. I use a white cane, screen-reading software and AI glasses to navigate, access information and investigate the world. Each gives me something useful to work with; I still have to interpret it and decide what to do. That experience informs my writing about technology and the conditions that help people participate more fully.
I also play guitar for pleasure. It has taken me a while to learn that enjoying the music is a worthwhile achievement in its own right.
The same curiosity brings me back to writing, podcasting and conversations with people whose experience differs from mine. There is usually more to understand, and often something useful we can do with it.