TOUGHERthan is perseverance in pursuit.
To my mind, TOUGHERthan is a doctrine to the designedly perennial pursuit of being the very best version of ourselves; embracing being as both a stillness and an act of growth – admittedly a concept I didn’t consciously begin to understand until my mid-thirties but a practise I had inadvertently employed for most of my life.
Being a kid adapting to vision that was simultaneously vacillating while deteriorating produced a built-in clause to the definition of typical: RELATIVE. In hindsight, I recognise this as one of my inceptive lessons in perceptions from which I grew expectations that were outside the usual confines and in opposition of stereotypes.
One of thirty individuals selected from one-thousand applicants, I was the youngest and first blind student accepted into the national school of design. By this time my education in perceptions had extended to the disconnect between lens and world – the “relative” clause had been hit with resistance – an awareness that the “green” I see is not the “green” you see (and not just because I was going blind). Final phase selections were determined via in-person portfolio critique and I quickly realised that for the designer to be seen I needed to present as their “typical” (no white cane, just sunglasses and a memorised floorplan). Unwittingly employing TOUGHERthan, I had accepted navigating a world in which I needed to draw on atypical approaches to maneuver beyond presumption-based social constraints. Blind is my commonplace, ground level, whereas design was an impassioned pursuit. Being selected based on the quality of my portfolio is my anecdotal crux, however, to others the adjoining of blind and design is quintessentially remarkable – every lens is different.
“Just because I don’t have sight, doesn’t mean I don’t have vision,” I was 21 years old, Swinburne’s National School of Design’s 2006 valedictorian, and still incognisant of my affect. Being the best version of ourselves involves conscious choices and perseverance in our pursuits. Everyday acts, those self-evaluated as trifling, can and do incite transmutations – it’s this dissection of ordinary that is the extraordinary. How we perceive life events sets the stage for TOUGHERthan.
