I Am A Black Albino And I Didn't Know Who I Was

Template:St

**I Am A Black Albino And I Didn't Know Who I Was** is the 99th episode of ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

## Original description

This guy’s called Ross, and he’s a living contradiction. He’s a black albino person. He has white skin, blonde hair and hazel eyes. He can't be exposed to the sun, and he has very poor vision. No one predicted a happy life for him when he was born, but his goal in life is to prove that these doomsayers were all wrong.

Ross’s first and most obvious problem is that he’s almost blind. He has constant rapid eye movement, and can't read anything without a lens. He also has problems with depth of vision and hand-eye coordination. When he was born, the doctors and social workers warned his mom straightaway that he would probably have the same limitations as blind people for his entire life. On top of that, Ross had other difficulties.

He always felt very lonely when he was growing up, all because of the stereotypes. He comes from a black family that lives in a largely black district, and he went to a mixed school. And even if it doesn't sound fair, at some point you need to either fall in with the black guys, or with the white guys. Where did he belong? Unfortunately, the black kids considered him to be white – and with his white skin and blond hair, that was quite logical from their point of view. But the white kids turned him away because he was, for them, a black guy. This of course left him totally alone – he had no friends, no guys to hang out with, and nearly no identity. He had to adapt.

The good thing was that he was never bullied, probably because he was so obviously different from everyone else that there was no point in underlining it even more. But there was another side to it – all the teachers knew that Ross had very poor vision, and because they therefore felt sorry for him, they tried to make his life easier – a little too easy in his view. For example, he was always the last one to be asked to answer a question, even if he was quite good at his studies. Maybe they thought that it was hard or scary for him to talk in front of everyone.

But you know, since no one was actually mean to him, at some point when he was growing up Ross felt the need to have more of a social life. Remember that no one accepted him as an equal? So he thought that maybe sports might be something that could bring him closer to others. But what sports could he do? His PE teacher always made him do something very simple, and do it separately from the other kids – some basic fitness, nothing really exciting. While all the time everyone else played football, basketball or some other team game that he was excluded from. However one day Ross decided that the time had come to be integrated into his peer group.

He asked his PE teacher: “Could you let me play with everyone?” The game was very basic – something like football or rugby, but very simplified. Nothing he couldn't manage, in fact. So the coach initially expressed his doubts, but then said, “Well, why not? Give it a try at least”. Ross noticed the sour expressions on the faces of his teammates, but he ignored them. At the first whistle they started running, and one of his teammates took the ball. It was big and red, and he didn't have any problem seeing it. But unfortunately he had some problems with depth, which meant that in this case he wasn't very good at defining the distance between himself and the ball.

So the guy in front of him passed him the ball. He saw it perfectly but didn't calculate its distance well enough, and ended up stopping it with his face. Everyone laughed. But so did Ross – it was actually really funny. The PE teacher wanted him to stop, but he insisted on having another go. After a couple of attempts he got much better, and managed to catch the ball and pass it on to his more athletic classmates without any problems. And what was more important was that for the first time he felt accepted by the group, and enjoyed the feeling of pushing out the boundaries that had always restricted him.

That ball game changed Ross’s way of thinking. He stopped waiting passively to be accepted and took the initiative himself to get what he wanted – to become more sociable. Sport soon became his way of overcoming the unsatisfactory situation he was in. He played rugby and soccer, and broke quite a number of bones at judo. He knew he wasn't born to do those things, but he was determined not to live the life that had been predicted for him at birth. He wanted a full life like everyone else...