As told to Macey Shofroth | Photo by Duane Tinkey

Sylvia Nemmers was born totally blind. 

At age 4, she had an experimental surgery at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics to give her a little bit of vision. Shortly after, she began attending the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton, Iowa. She lived and studied there for three years, then attended St. Augustin and Dowling Catholic schools in Des Moines.

Her teachers didn’t encourage her to study science as a kid, but her father, who was also totally blind, encouraged her. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in biochemistry from Kansas State University and a Ph.D. in environmental chemistry from New Mexico State University.

Today, she’s the department chair for environmental science in the American Public University system. She wrote a book about her life, “Happy Now? Shattering the Myth of Happily Ever After,” that was released in August. 

The following story has been formatted to be entirely in her words, and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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When you are blind and you live in a world that’s predominantly designed for the sighted person, you always have to deal with fear. From childhood, if I’m going to go out my door, even if I know where I’m going, there’s always the possibility that there’s construction or somebody who intends you some harm. 

As a kid, I just wanted to be able to do things that my brothers and sisters did. While I couldn’t just ride a bike or drive a car, I had to learn to use the bus system. My father, because he was also blind, said, “We’ll support you, but you have to learn how to do this, because it’s the way your life is going to be.” So I felt like, if I let that fear control me, then I’ve hit limits. And I wanted to live beyond the limits. 

I’m a professor, so I teach. When somebody learns to do something, that’s knowledge acquisition. Then they get good at it, and they call it fluency. You become great at it, and you have mastery. So because I have to face that fear every time I leave my home, I feel like I’ve reached mastery, and I feel like it’s my superpower.

Here’s the problem, though. Any good superhero movie starts out when the superhero realizes they have this power, and they use it recklessly. They have good intentions and they tend to mess things up right in the beginning of understanding how to wield that power. That was me, too. I did some reckless things in my life because I was fearless. I had to, with time and experience, learn how to wield it. 

After I started to understand how to wield that superpower, I was able to distinguish when the thing I was fearing was legitimate and I needed to be a little more careful.

I didn’t use a guide dog or a cane for many years, because, sadly, my ex-husband always told me, “Don’t act blind. No one will respect you if you act blind.” As if I were acting. But you hear that for a couple decades, and it has some real impact on you. So I would go out and I’d take my kids, and as they got older, they became my eyes for a while. It was kind of a reckless thing to do, but I wasn’t fearful. Maybe I should have had a little fear there.

Once I left that marriage and my kids were 14, 16 and 18, I realized, if I’ve done my parenting job correctly, in the next few years, they’re going to be living their own independent lives. I had to realize that it was not safe for me to just go out into the world. My vision was getting worse, and my children needed to live their lives, so I had to decide what to do. I needed to either use a cane or get a guide dog or do some combination of those things. 

I was afraid that the first thing everyone will know about me is that I’m blind, even if they never talk to me. I was afraid of that, because people knowing that I’m blind has caused me to not get jobs. I have a great resume. If I apply virtually, I almost always get the job. Apply in person with a cane or a guide dog and tell them I have a Ph.D. in chemistry? Didn’t ever get a job that way. So there was some fear in me that I’m going to be judged. Sometimes, I go out in the street, and I have people walk up to me and say, “I’m so sorry for you.” And I’m just like, “What, really? No, I’m good.” 

So I sat with that fear for awhile and realized that the fear itself was limiting. I had to decide this is what I need to do to live my best life, to live a safe life, to live a life where I get to go all the places and do all the things I want to do. And so I trained with my first guide dog and I began using a cane if I didn’t have the dog with me. 

Overcoming that fear won me the prize of authenticity. It really allowed me to say, “I don’t need to have somebody else decide for me. It doesn’t even matter what other people might think of me if I’m living my best life and achieving the things that are important to me.” If I’m able to support other people in their journey to be fearless and authentic, then I’m great. 

I was a practicing Muslim for 28 years, and I covered my hair in a hijab so people always had questions like, “Why do you dress like that?” Or they ask, “Can I pet your dog?” or “How did you get a Ph.D.?” All of these questions don’t bother me. They’re questions. They haven’t decided what they know about me. 

I loved reading as a child. I read through the Library of Congress’ “Talking Books for the Blind and Visually Impaired.” Books came on vinyl, then cassette tapes, then CDs and now they’re digital downloads. Long before audio books were a thing for the general public, they were a thing for the visually impaired. I read big books like “Dune” and “The Hobbit.” But I couldn’t read the textbooks in my classes very well, so I had to listen really carefully. 

In sixth grade, I got put into the slow reading class. And I just laughed. I thought, “How do adults think I’m a slow reader?” I read all the time, I just can’t read that way. 

Technology has made a real difference. In high school, before the Americans with Disabilities Act, my counselor would take the photocopies of tests and blow it up to like 400%. I’d have these giant papers that I could get close to and read. When I started college, I had to pay people to read books for me. But now, because of technology, I can teach you how to make every device you have read to you. I used to have to pay for expensive programs to do most of my screen reading, and for some things I still do, but I can open my phone and read a PDF and a PowerPoint. I use this when I teach. I teach at an online university, so everything is submitted electronically. I can listen to things really fast. Technology has opened so many doors. I probably would have broken them down anyway and gone through them, but it just makes it so much easier. 

My father never got to go to the university. He was totally blind. He was a business owner. He was president of a couple of different organizations for the blind. He was very intelligent and motivated, but in his day, he couldn’t go to the university. I have one brother who also has a vision problem who didn’t really want to go to college. But I did, so my dad encouraged me and said, “Study whatever you want.” He had always loved the sciences. When we’d go on long car drives, he’d put out a math equation into the car, and instead of looking for slug bugs and those kinds of things, we’d play games with trivia questions and math. 

I really thought science was interesting. When I started to study science, I could see what some people might call God or the divine. I could see the existence of this thing greater than myself. Every cell is a little universe with so much going on. Biochemistry just blew me away. This is such an intricate, elaborate system. My study of soil was not so intentional. We’d come back from living overseas. We needed more income to be able to support our family. There was somebody looking for somebody to develop a lab for environmental science. I didn’t have an environmental science background, but I had the science background. So I went and met with the professor and at the end of it, she’s like, “Oh my God, you’re perfect.” And then she started introducing me to her colleagues as her new graduate student. 

When I was doing my master’s program in biochemistry, I had a really amazing professor who would come up with these really ingenious ways to help me. In chemistry, you have a pipette and a bulb and you’re supposed to suck up so many milliliters of the fluid. I wanted to try to do it, so he brought syringes and we notched the plungers so I could pull them to the right number of notches and I could measure out the liquids that I needed. It worked so well that he hired me to prep solutions for the different labs. 

I enjoyed research, but I always loved teaching. That professor brought me on to teach a recitation class, going through the difficult concepts and explaining them. It had never been taught by a graduate student before, and I got an award for teaching that class. As I lived overseas in Jordan and Greece, I homeschooled my kids and I loved teaching them, as well. So I knew it was my passion. 

Doing this online can make teaching much easier, because there’s less that you necessarily have to disclose. But when I teach on Zoom, I have to turn my screen reader off and so I have to disclose that if you’re typing in the chat box, I’m not going to see that. I think it goes right along with having a guide dog. I’m there to be receptive if you have a concern, but I’m not going to worry too much about it. If I’m teaching in a face-to-face experience, I just explain to people that if you raise your hand, your fingers are going to go numb because I’m not going to know. You can most certainly say, “Excuse me, Dr. Nemmers,” and I will be happy to help. What they’re thinking about me is beyond me, and I don’t really need to know. 

When I lived in Saudi Arabia, I was thinking I’d teach for a university. They told me quite clearly that they knew I was qualified, but there would be people who would say they didn’t get the grade they wanted because of my vision. I just kept working with my online teaching. 

Teaching with a disability is different. I memorize a lot, like my PowerPoints. I always tell the class, because I make my slides bright so that I can follow a pattern, that if I get off by a slide just tell me. When I defended my thesis and presented at different university events, I would make a disclaimer, “If I get to the wrong slide and I’m talking about one thing and the slide says another, just say, ‘Excuse me!’” I have to address my humanity. I don’t need to pretend that I can do what I can’t. 

There was a time in my life that I truly believed being happy was something you could only have once in a while. If you were happy once or twice a year, that was OK. You don’t get to be happy all the time. And as I’ve gone through this experience of really accepting who I am, how I am, and letting go of a lot of the hurt of a life that had been hard sometimes, I started to realize that I was looking for happily ever after, and that is not achievable. And it’s not what I want. What I want is to be happy right now. 

What does happy mean? Does it mean I’m never upset about anything, or there’s not challenges in my life? No, but I understand that I have the power to react to certain things and to choose. I have the power to decide to be authentic and honestly myself, and even through the uncomfortable emotions, I’m still feeling happy. So the title of my book is “Happy Now? Shattering the Myth of Happily Ever After.” Because I want everyone to find their path. I don’t have the path to anybody else’s “happy now,” but I can tell you about my path. If you can resonate with the journey, then maybe somebody will find their first step to their “happy now.”