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“Differently abled,” my left foot:

A North Carolina woman says she is happier than ever after she fulfilled her lifelong wish of becoming blind.

Jewel Shuping, 30, has Body Integrity Identity Disorder, according to Barcroft TV.

BIID is a condition in which able-bodied people believe they are meant to be disabled.
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“By the time I was six I remember that thinking about being blind made me feel comfortable,” she said.

Shuping says that when she was a teenager, she started wearing thick black sunglasses, and even got her first cane when she was 18.

By the age of 20, Shuping says she was fluent in braille.

“I was ‘blind-simming’, which is pretending to be blind, but the idea kept coming up in my head and by the time I was 21 it was a non-stop alarm that was going off,” she told Barcroft TV.

Her need to lose her sight increased as she got older, and by 2006, she claims she found a psychologist who was willing to help her.

Shuping says the psychologist put numbing eye drops into her eyes, and then a couple of drops of drain cleaner.

“It hurt, let me tell you. My eyes were screaming and I had some drain cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin,” she said. “But all I could think was ‘I am going blind, it is going to be okay.”

Can you imagine permanently disfiguring yourself in order to feel okay?