Kristen Cox: Gov. Ehrlich’s top pick

Q: Are you totally blind?

A: I am mostly blind. I have a little peripheral vision in my left eye. But for most intents and purposes, I use non-visual techniques — cane, auditory, readers, lots of things. It started when I was about 11, then took a real dive when I was in college.

Q: What caused it?

It’s genetic disease called Stargardt’s, a recessive trait that showed up in me. But I had a great support system, a great family. In college, I got connected with a great group of blind people that served as great mentoring and role models, sort of teaching me the tricks of the trade. It’s all about good technique, and having elevated expectations.

Part of my message to other people with disabilities is that there are some real subtle stigmas out there that society has about people with disabilities. And that includes people with disabilities themselves. I had very low expectations about what I was going to be able to do. And really being connected with some very successful blind people made a big difference for me.

Q: How different is it from being blind from birth?

There’s pros and cons. I didn’t learn Braille till I had kids. I had to go through college without taking notes. I knew no Braille. I had no way of capturing information. I had to memorize everything. I really wanted to be able to read to my son. So I started to learn Braille when he was first born. But I’m slow at Braille. If you’re born blind, you tend to get some of those skills earlier on.

Part of the struggle we face with kids with low vision or some vision who may go blind later on in life, they don’t get those skills up front, and then as adults they struggle. Luckily, I was able to get what I needed to get to be successful. Really a turning point for me was learning Braille. In college I just had to memorize everything — I had no way to take notes. I’d memorize it and go home, talk it out to my husband, have people read my tests to me and do whatever I could do to get through school.

Q: You were married.

I actually served a mission in Brazil for my church, and that was a big turning point as well. Then came back and married soon after. It was about two years of school left after that.

Q: Women serve as Mormon missionaries as well?

Absolutely. I was so glad to go foreign. I love travel. I’ve stayed in Japan, and Spain and Europe. I loved it. A lot of it was service-oriented.

Q: Where did you grow up?

Born in Seattle, raised in Utah. Went to Brigham Young University. The blindness piece now, once you get good skills, and once you are really oriented that it doesn’t need to be the end of your life, it becomes nothing more than an inconvenience. Would I like to be sighted? Sure. Transportation would be much easier in my life. But more than anything else, it’s an inconvenience that you work around. You creatively problem-solve. You do things differently. But it works. [I’ve got a great family, great kids, great husband. [I’m] pretty happy.

Q: Did you become an advocate for people with disabilities early on?

If you have a disability, you’re always an advocate in some way or another, because you always try to advocate for your own needs. Starting out in Utah, I ran an organization for blind people on the state level. Came out here. I did advocacy in D.C. for the National Federation for the Blind based in Baltimore. That’s when I met Gov. Ehrlich when he was a congressman. I’d take the train down and camp out for the day in D.C. We had no satellite office.

Q: You were like a street person.

In some ways it was great because I got to know some of the congressional offices. They’d take pity on me so they’d let me set up shop. That’s when I met Congressman Ehrlich, who was even then a real champion for people with disabilities, not just for the blind. He did a lot of work with mental health. That’s how we became acquainted. The system has been designed to create dependency for people with disabilities. Not intentionally, but that’s one of the consequences. And there’s a lot of incentives for people not to go back to work, not to become independent. And Congressman Ehrlich worked with us on some legislation to sweep away some of those disincentives. After he became governor, I became director of the governor’s office for individuals with disabilities with the expectation that we would help draft the legislation to establish this department, the first of its kind in the country. This is the first time there’s been a secretary that sits on the cabinet with the other secretaries to develop initiatives] around disabilities.

llazarick@baltimoreexaminer.com