Dual Paralympian Darren Harris on the power of vulnerability in building connection

The most common question that dual Paralympian, Darren Harris, is asked when he speaks to school children is why he wears sunglasses.

For many years England’s most capped blind footballer would give them a range of responses that skirted the periphery of the truth – he had dry eyes, they made him look cool, he got them for free from Ray-Ban.

That is until one day, Harris looked out at a classroom of expectant faces and decided to tell them about the formative experience that shaped the underlying answer to their question.

Harris shared how he was visiting family as a 10-year-old when a younger cousin who had not seen him since his surgeries for bilateral retinoblastoma walked into the room.

“I wasn’t wearing any glasses and she was so terrified that she ran into the corner and started screaming. It was like a scene from Dr Who,” Harris recounted during his keynote presentation at Optometry Tomorrow (14–15 June, Harrogate Convention Centre).

“What I remember from that day is that all of the adults went to comfort her, and nobody came to me. In that moment, I thought that meeting me must be like seeing a cyclops – I was someone who frightened little children,” he said.

From that point onwards, Harris started wearing sunglasses – with the dark lenses reducing his already limited vision further.

“It meant I couldn’t see very well, but it stopped other kids from being frightened of me,” he said.

Harris told delegates that disclosing this story to a room of school children had unforeseen consequences.

“When I told them that story, my intention was to give them a sense of perspective,” he said.

“But that isn’t what happened. After my session, all these kids started coming up and sharing their own stories. They told me about what they were going through at home and at school,” Harris recalled.

Harris encouraged practitioners to consider how they can be more open in their own roles to make themselves more approachable as leaders.

“Sometimes when we are in a position of authority, we say that we have an open-door policy and that people can come to us with their problems, but why would they do that if it has never been modelled?” Harris reflected.

“Vulnerability is truly how we connect,” Harris emphasised.

Life lessons

During his keynote address, Harris described people he met with sight loss who changed his perception of what it meant to be visually impaired.

He recalled one man who would always ask people for their used train tickets. This puzzled Harris until he saw the man hand over a stack of tickets to the train conductor.

“There were tickets for Newcastle, tickets for Liverpool, tickets for Plymouth. After a while, the ticket man just handed him back the stack and said, ‘I’m sure it’s in there’,” Harris said.

Another acquaintance would eat half his hamburger and fries before knocking them on the floor, with a server promptly bringing him a fresh meal.

“This is what we call playing the blind card,” Harris shared.

Harris shared that these connections taught him that you could still have a sense of humour with sight loss and use it to your own advantage.

“It showed me that these guys were human. They were just as devious as anyone else,” he observed.

When Harris was at school, he observed the innovative ways that pupils would navigate the challenges posed by sight loss.

For example, there were different methods that were used to locate footballs that went over the fence to a neighbouring field.

“You had to get to the ball before it stopped, because then the ball bearings would stop making a sound,” Harris recalled.

However, there were occasions when his classmates were not fast enough to find the ball before it stopped moving.

When this happened, they would lie head to toe and roll across the grass, or take a long stick and spin in circles.

“They developed these really creative ways of being able to find the ball,” he said.

The importance of technology

In response to a delegate question about what advice practitioners could give to patients with sight loss, Harris recommended making them aware of emerging technology.

“It’s incredible what you can do with AI. I think for the youngsters coming through, really mastering the tech would be advantageous,” he shared.

Harris added that he has friends who use AI tools to help them get dressed. Last year, Harris used his Ray-Ban Meta glasses to tour a Zurich art gallery.

Harris initially gave his glasses to a gallery worker and asked him to see how accurate they were in describing a painting.

“He came back to me completely blown away and said that is a better description than I could have given you,” he recalled.

“I walked around the whole art gallery on my own. It was a truly liberating experience. I was quite emotional afterwards,” Harris said.