There’s a particular kind of sentence you hear whenever disability comes up:
There’s a particular kind of sentence you hear whenever disability comes up:
“I’ve tried to imagine what it must be like to be blind.”
It sounds compassionate. Often it’s sincerely meant. But as my guest Sy Hoekstra would tell you, it’s not very helpful.
In the trailer for his podcast and Substack, Deep Sy, Sy sets it up like a typical solemn disability PSA:
“Have you ever imagined what it’s like to be blind?
To live in the world without being able to see it…”
And then he snaps the line:
“Well, if you have imagined it, please stop.
Why would you try to imagine something you don’t know anything about?
Just listen to actual blind people — specifically me.”
That pivot is the whole point.
Imagination Isn’t Enough
Sy isn’t against empathy; he’s against the version that begins and ends in our own heads.
He talked about all the “blindfold experiences” sighted people do:
- Put on a blindfold for five minutes,
- Feel disoriented and scared,
- Then take it off and conclude, “Wow, blindness must be awful. I get it now.”
But what you’ve experienced is only what the first five minutes of sudden sight-loss feels like. Sy doesn’t wake up every morning and panic. He wakes up, makes coffee, checks email—just using different tools.
Having a boring, routine, blind morning is a learned skill. You can’t replicate it in an afternoon.
Worse, when we trust that quick simulation, we fill in the rest with our fears:
- “If I lost my sight, my life would be over; therefore, yours must feel over.”
- “I’d be terrified to cross a street; therefore, you crossing a street is heroic.”
That’s not empathy. It’s projection, wrapped in pity.
What Sy asks instead is simple, and harder:
- Stop assuming.
- Start listening.
- Let blind people—and any group we don’t understand—tell us what’s actually true.
Most of the Hard Stuff Is Designed, Not Innate
One of Sy’s most important points is that the biggest obstacles he faces are not his eyes. They’re the systems and spaces we’ve built:
- Websites that ignore screen readers.
- Doors, elevators, transit, apps all designed with sight as the default.
- People interacting with him out of raw guesswork rather than knowledge.
Figuring out how to pour coffee without seeing the pot is work, he said. But it’s solvable.
What really wears on him is the artificial hardship—what didn’t need to be hard, if the world had been designed with more than one kind of body and brain in mind.
That’s where “imagine what it’s like” breaks down. It focuses on our momentary discomfort rather than changing what actually needs changing.
The Weight of Proving Yourself
Sy’s story is also about the weight we put on ourselves.
His parents, wisely, decided never to tell him what his limits were. They wanted him to discover them for himself. That was a gift.
Internally, though, he translated it into this:
“If no one sets my limits, I must have none. I should be able to do anything anyone else does.”
Make that vow in a world that already underestimates you, and you get a relentless drive to prove yourself. It carried him into academic success, law school, and intense work as a public defender—but at the cost of burnout.
He went to therapy for unrelated reasons. His therapist gently asked about disability. Sy’s first reaction was: absolutely not. “I’m not here to have a sighted therapist tell me the real problem is that I’m blind.”
But then, one session, he finally said out loud:
“I do not like how people treat me.
It makes me feel terrible.
I wish they would stop.”
And he felt something physically shift—like a weight moving in his chest.
That’s how stored burdens work. Anxiety and anger are often the body’s attempt to say, “This hurts.” Naming it is not the whole cure, but it is the first loosening of the knot.
Jesus once said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest… my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30).
Part of that “light burden” may simply be this:
Stop carrying expectations that were never yours to begin with—especially other people’s assumptions about what your life must be like.
Humor as Hope, Not Mockery
This is where Sy’s humor lives. For him, it isn’t a mask or a weapon; it’s an act of hope.
As a kid he devoured Dave Barry, David Sedaris, Jon Stewart. Comedy helped him say, “This is absurd—but I’m still here, and there’s more to life than this.”
The Deepsy trailer is a perfect example:
- It starts like an earnest “inspirational” video.
- It undercuts that with “please stop imagining.”
- Then it lands in a place that’s both funny and deeply sane: “Just listen to actual blind people—specifically me.”
You get to laugh at yourself for a second—for all the gaps you’ve confidently filled in—and then get handed a better way: humility, curiosity, and relationship.
That’s not far from Jesus’ own style. His image of a man with a log in his eye critiquing someone’s speck is intentionally ridiculous. You’re meant to picture it and laugh—and then realize he’s talking about you.
Good humor is a holy mirror:
- It punctures ego without destroying dignity.
- It exposes how seriously we take ourselves.
- It invites us to be small in our own eyes in the best way: honest, grounded, human.
Sy’s work does that. It doesn’t ask you to wallow in his hardship. It invites you to see the absurdities we’ve built into the world—and to believe we can do better.
A Wider Listening: Facets of the One
At the end of the show, I announced a project that lives in the same spirit of listening across our limits—this time in the realm of faith.
It’s called Facets of the One.
It’s a short set of nine devotional readings designed for use in groups—around kitchen tables, in small fellowships, living rooms, wherever people gather to seek God together.
The basic conviction is simple—and as disruptive—in a good way.
- There is one God.
- That God has spoken, and is speaking, into many cultures and languages.
- Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and other scriptures each reflect facets of the same light.
- If we stop imagining we fully grasp God from inside our own silo, and start listening across those boundaries, we may see more of that light, not less.
Facets of the One explores that through shared readings—from the Sh’ma (“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one”) to parallel affirmations in other traditions—coupled with questions meant to draw people into conversation, not argument.
It’s a small tool for something very large: communities that learn to hear God not just in their own tradition, but in the testimonies of others as well.
That’s another form of humility: admitting we can’t imagine everyone else’s spiritual experience from the outside, and choosing instead to sit down and learn.
Next Week: A Peace Proposal Between Judaism and Christianity
All this listening—across disability, across traditions—connects directly to next week’s guest.
On December 23rd, I’ll be joined by Ellen Charry, emerita professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. As a child, she was a “nice Jewish girl” who one day realized not everyone in her neighborhood was Jewish. That seed grew into a life-long calling.
Her journey took her:
- Through Hebrew school and marriage to a rabbi’s son,
- Into Christian faith and decades teaching systematic theology,
- And now, in her so‑called “retirement,” into writing what she calls a peace proposal between Judaism and Christianity.
Not just, “Let’s be nice to each other,” but a serious theological proposal that:
- The two traditions themselves find ways to share God,
- So that God’s world can flourish rather than languish,
- Especially in a time of rising antisemitism and religious suspicion.
In Ellen’s words, when Jews and Christians are at odds, we languish, and creation languishes. That is not the Creator’s desire.
If Facets of the One is a small way to gather people around that vision, Ellen’s work is the big blueprint: a way for two massive, interwoven traditions to learn, at last, to listen—to God, and to each other.
We’ll unpack that together next week, the night before the night before Christmas.
Until then, may we practice what Sy modeled so beautifully:
- Less projection, more listening.
- Less self‑importance, more laughter.
- Less carrying impossible weights, more sharing the yoke with the One who calls it light.
And as always:
You are created in the image of God, and God loves His creation.
