The time seems ripe for political and philosophical reflections. People still want to read that in spite of your being a quadriplegic on a respirator or blind as a bat, you sail the Atlantic alone, you cross the finish line, you scale Everest. This is bad stuff because it loses sight of most of our lives. There is a lot in our culture that approves of being a fighter, about not taking disease or disability lying down. Aside from keeping you busy, you supposedly stir up some good hormones, victory hormones, hopefulness hormones, and they are supposed to throw up a fence around your disease.
Many people view optimism in a similar way.
Optimists, I'm sure, live longer than pessimists. They don't fret, worry, angst about much of anything. But how anyone living in this world can be an optimist is beyond me. Still, people not only live with blindness but live very well with it and a host of other blights, often contributing interesting, even important views of the world. In the same vein, an otherwise disabled person might have something important to say about the non-disabled world, not to speak of all living forms.