Transforming Adversity Into Purpose | Dave Steele, The Blind Poet

In this compelling interview, Jillian Comstock sits down with Dave Steele, also known as The Blind Poet. Dave shares his incredible journey from being a professional singer to becoming an inspirational poet and advocate for those with low vision and blindness.

Key Highlights:

• Discover how Dave Steele uses poetry to support and empower individuals affected by low vision and blindness.
• Hear the moving story of how a rewritten version of “Stand By Me” became the catalyst for Dave’s purpose.
• Learn about the challenges Dave faced when he lost his vision and how he turned them into opportunities to help others.
• Be inspired by Dave’s message that blindness and disability are not excuses to do less but reasons to do more.

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Transcript:

Jillian Comstock:

Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Jill, and welcome to My Hero 360. Here at My Hero 360, we honor, celebrate, and connect heroes worldwide. Their voices can serve as a catalyst for change encouraging others to find their own strength and pursue their passions. Today we are showcasing Dave Steele’s story, also known as The Blind Poet. Dave, thank you for being here today and allowing our team at My Hero 360 to share your unique story.

Dave Steele:

My pleasure.

Jillian Comstock:

I read extensively about your story; we’ve met before, and your story is inspiring and so compelling that the folks out there need to hear it, and I am just so excited to be able to interview you today and get that story shared for everyone. But before we begin, I want to give you the opportunity to introduce yourself and provide a little background so our audience can get to know you a little better.

Dave Steele:

Sure. My name is Dave Steele. I am from Manchester here in the UK. I am a father to 4 amazing kids and a guide dog called Christopher. I got an amazing wife called Amy. I’m a family person at heart, but I’ve come to be known as The Blind Poet because I use poetry as a way for supporting people who are affected by low vision, blindness, disability, additional needs, anxiety, mental health, lots of different things. People use my poetry as a way for them to describe how they’re feeling to their friends and family when they can’t find the words themselves. Also, as a great way of raising awareness for all the misconceptions surrounding disability.

Jillian Comstock:

Wonderful. Before we jump in and dive in, I just wanted to say, I don’t know why this took me so long to notice, but your logo, The Blind Poet, has braille embedded into the B and the P.

Dave Steele:

Correct. Yeah.

Jillian Comstock:

I thought that was so clever.

Dave Steele:

Yeah, funny. I’ve actually got it tattooed on me.

Jillian Comstock:

Oh, no way. You do?

Dave Steele:

Yeah, I have lots of tattoos on my arms, and they’re all related to my story and my poetry and the work that I do.

Jillian Comstock:

I know. I really felt like that’s just brilliant because it’s just so significant to you and what you do. Speaking of The Blind Poet, you’ve created a name for yourself as The Blind Poet. Can you share the origin behind that and just describe the circumstance in your life that led you to refer to yourself as The Blind Poet?

Dave Steele:

Sure. The set of circumstances, how it came to be, is I talk about this story quite a lot and it never loses the impact every time I tell it on myself because it’s just such a strange, bizarre set of events that led me to this. I have a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, or RP for short, which is a hereditary condition. There’s no treatment or cure for RP currently, and the way you tend to lose your sight with RP is it starts off with night blindness, so struggling from light to dark places. Then you lose your peripheral vision like a tunnel closing inwards, and then you start to lose your central vision.

I always knew we had it in our family. It comes from my mom’s side. I first heard about it when I was about 7 years old, but was always told that it wouldn’t affect me until much later on in life and just kind of get on and forget about it, which I did. When I left school here in the UK, I worked as a singer for many years, sang all over the world as professional singer, and then things kind of changed for me in my late 30s when I was officially diagnosed with RP. I went for a routine eye exam. There’d been a big change in my vision. I was told to kind of stop driving straight away and was referred to a retinal specialist and then 2 weeks later I was declared severely sight impaired or legally blind.

What happened then was a set of circumstances a lot of people who go through this kind of thing will be all too familiar with. I lost my job because everything that I’d done involved me driving around and getting around independently. At the time, I was working as a singer driving around doing gigs. I was also working in car sales, so that involved driving, doing test drives, and things like that. I struggled with anxiety and depression because not just of the sight that I was losing, but also the financial pressure of losing my job. We lost our house and had to feed our kids on food parcels and food banks for a while because we were struggling financially because of the circumstances we found ourselves in.

Then what happened was when I was probably at my lowest of really struggling with things mentally with my mental health, I got invited to a support group. When the organizers of the support group heard that I was a professional singer, they said to me, “Would you come along and sing some songs that day and be the entertainment for the support group?” I immediately said yes because that was taking away the anxiety of being around of visually impaired people for the first time, which I was really nervous about going to this support group for the first time. Being on stage or singing was always kind of my comfort zone. Immediately I said yes.

Then the night before going to the support group, I was going over ideas of songs to sing, and I just had this kind of eureka moment where I thought it’d be great if I could take a song that everyone knows and change the words and talk about my experiences so far with low vision. I chose Stand By Me by Ben E. King because the opening line of, ‘When the night has come and the land is dark and the moon is the only light we’ll see,” that described the night blindness aspect of RP.

Jillian Comstock:

Wow.

Dave Steele:

I rewrote the song in bed. It took me about 20 minutes. The words just came to me, and then when I performed it the following day, people were coming up to me in tears and shaking my hand and saying to me that the words that I’d written was describing how they’d always felt about their experiences living with blindness and low vision. That was kind of the catalyst. I just started writing poetry every single day and posting it on social media, posting it on the support groups online, on the likes of Facebook. Every time I did that, I would get messages from people all over the world saying that they were using my words as a way for them to describe how they were feeling and how they were sharing that with their family, and it was helping them. That kind of gave me my purpose back in the world.

Fast-forward now, it was actually people online that started calling me The Blind Poet. Actually The Blind Poet, we’re talking about the tattoos thing, The Blind Poet, the first blind poet was a Greek philosopher by the name of Homer who wrote the Odyssey and the Iliad. I’ve actually got a tattoo of Homer on my shoulder here, and my son Austin often says to me, “Oh dad, he was the first blind poet and you are the new one, aren’t you?” I think that’s kind of cool.

Jillian Comstock:

That is cool.

Dave Steele:

Very proud of that.

Jillian Comstock:

It’s awesome that your followers kind of gave you this name. That’s just so amazing.

Dave Steele:

Yeah. Everything was kind of led from them. When I first started writing the poetry, well, from that first moment at that support group when I got that reaction to the song, I just felt like this is something I can do to make a difference in the world. Because quite often when people are diagnosed with a condition or a disability or anything life-changing, we go through this thing where we lose our independence, we lose our confidence, our pride, but also our purpose in the world. A lot of people were telling me the things that I couldn’t do because I was going blind instead of the things that I could do.

When I found that I could write and share the experiences, the good days and the bad days, and it was helping others, especially through music and poetry, because poetry to me is music.

Jillian Comstock:

Of course.

Dave Steele:

Like song lyrics. It just seemed such a natural thing to do and it just encouraged me to write more and more.

Jillian Comstock:

That’s just amazing. Speaking of poetry, I want to talk a little more about it. Can you share with us how poetry has been a catalyst to helping yourself and others?

Dave Steele:

Yeah, I mean exactly in that. My background in music, I’m a great believer. I think one of the things that I’ve really learned through this whole experience of losing my sight has been the things that we go through and not just me, everyone, the things that we go through in our past, all the dark days, the tough things that we go through, they give us the tools and the armor to face the thing that we yet to face going forward. All my previous experience, the good and bad days, so the years I spent working as a singer gave me the ability to understand rhythm and flow and write the poetry. I always thought I was meant to be a singer, but actually this is what I’ve been meant to do. That just kind of led me to do this. The dark days that I had in my past with mental health and things gave me the ability to kind of share things that other people find it difficult to talk about, and it’s led me to where I am today.

Jillian Comstock:

Awesome. Do you still sing now or not as much?

Dave Steele:

Not as much because the impacts that I have now reading poetry and going and speaking at events like I do all over the world is so much better than … I spent 20 years as a singer and when you work as a singer, as a musician, you’d go into a gig and you’d never know if it was going to be a great night until the night was over. There was so many factors that could impact how the night was going to be. How your voice was, how the audience was, how many people were there, what the venue was like. But when I’m going and speaking about my story now as someone that’s going blind and reading the poetry, no matter how many people I’m speaking in front of, if it’s 5 people, 1,000 people, the impact is always the same. Yeah, I can still sing and actually sometimes when I do events, someone will say, “Oh, can you sing Stand By Me RP?” The song that was the catalyst to it all. I’ll break out into song and get them all singing along, but the poetry’s taken over.

Jillian Comstock:

That’s wonderful. In November of 2023, during your travels and speaking engagements in the United States, you shared in a Facebook post that it was the first time you experienced the impact of the deterioration of your remaining vision. This led to a sense of isolation and feeling confined in your room. You mentioned that you felt limited in your choices, trapped and confined by your disability and that so many others too feel the same way. Could you delve into how that experience felt and share the strategies or mindset shifts you’ve employed to empower yourself and overcome the sensation of being confined by your disability?

Dave Steele:

That’s a great question. Yeah, this has been something I’ve been battling with now for just over a year. From when I was first diagnosed, I lost all my peripheral vision within the first 8 or 9 months to the point where for years I had no useful vision in my left eye. Everything was completely blurred. I just had light perception. I could see hand movements, but no detail. In my right eye, I just had a small tunnel of vision, almost like looking through a straw. But the central vision I had within that tunnel was very clear, so I could still see faces and detail.

But then about a year ago, I noticed actually on a date night with my wife that I could no longer see her face clearly anymore. In the last year, I’ve lost all that kind of clarity. I can still see the outline of faces, so I can still make out the outline of your face, but it’s all blurry, and no matter what I look at now, everything’s blurry. When I went to America in November, that was my first overseas trip I’d done that year since the last part of my central vision had gone. My previous trips to the States, I’d always had people taking me around different places. But on these trips, which were very kind short trips, I didn’t have anyone to look after me 24/7 and take me out.

I’d find I was really hesitant about … I’d kind of make the travel there, I’d have assistance, I’d use my cane, and I’d have assistance at the airports and people picking me up and ferrying me to the hotels and things. But as far as actually when I was at the hotel to walk outside and take a walk around and go and see places in my spare time, which I’d normally do, I was very hesitant to do that because of my sight.

But one of the things that I’ve come to learn is these are barriers that we always adjust to, and I have adjusted. As a parent, myself and my wife, we always tell our children that nothing is scary as it first seems. Whenever they’re going to do something new for the first time, we always say, look, it’s never as scary as you think it’s going to be. Once you get past that first step, you’ll realize that. Actually as adults, we need to remind ourselves that that’s still true. No matter what we do in life, it’s never as scary as we make it out to be. Once we take that first step, we get this kind of sense of achievement that we’ve done that and it grows. That’s often the case with the things that I overcome with traveling and these kind of day-to-day things. It’s just that first step of getting yourself out there, but also that it’s perfectly natural to feel those things.

Jillian Comstock:

Absolutely. What you said is so profound. We are our own worst enemies at some points. We think things are scarier than they are and like you say, just about getting past that and really looking at the big picture here.

In the video featured on your website, you beautifully express in a poem that blindness won’t define us. There’s so much we can achieve. Could you elaborate on how you use this mindset to empower others navigating similar experiences?

Dave Steele:

Yeah, that video that you refer to was great. That was actually a video that was made by Meta as in Facebook. They reached out to me, decided to highlight my story on how I use social media to help people around the world. We shot that in 1 day here. They flew a film crew in from California, turned up on a Sunday morning, like 7:30 in the morning, and we shot that. I wrote that poem, especially for that video.

But yeah, blindness won’t define us. There’s so much we can achieve. I often say in a lot of my poetry and the talks that I do, that disability and blindness isn’t an excuse to do less, but a reason to do more and be more. I always talk about one of the things I’m very proud of is through this journey, I’ve taken my biggest challenges in life and turned them into my greatest achievements. Actually, I think the blindness can be an opportunity or any disability can be an opportunity to really take something that’s seen as a negative and use it in a positive way to do amazing things. I am so lucky that actually I’m so much happier than I was now before I started losing my sight because I’ve embraced this new kind of view and perspective. Actually, I notice more about the world now. I use that little tunnel of sight to appreciate the beauty in the life more than I ever did when I was fully sighted.

Jillian Comstock:

Of course. You are a direct reflection of that, of taking life’s challenges and turning them into positives. You’re just so inspiring, and your story is so compelling. Since building The Blind Poet platform that has advocated, educated, and inspired folks from around the globe, what has been the most rewarding experience for you?

Dave Steele:

God, there’s been so many. I’ve been so lucky. I mentioned Meta there and getting to be highlighted by Meta. I’ve got to work with Apple and lots of big organizations. Roche, we did a big campaign with them. But actually the kind of base of it all for me is actually that reaching people through the poetry. Being able to write a piece of poetry and put it onto social media and click a button and send it around the world to someone who really needs to hear those words today. That’s the heart of everything that I do and I’ve had some amazing lots of little stories of connections I’ve made with people all around the world.

I’ll give you one that really makes me so proud from a few years back. Back in 2019, I did my first USA book tour, and a few years before that when I released my first book Stand By Me RP, named after that song in 2018. I was contacted by a lady in Amarillo in Texas, and she has got a daughter by the name of Jackie, Jackie Wilson, which is just a great name. Anyway, but little Jackie at the time was about 6 years old. She had RP, but she had a really aggressive, different mutation to me where she was losing the sight rapidly at the age of 6 years old. She was using a cane in school and some of the kids were being mean to her because of her using a cane and bullying her for it.

Her mum had been reading my poetry to her to help her kind of come to terms with what she was going through at that age, and she used a couple of lines in my poems to come back at these bullies. Anyway, so her mum contacted me, we connected, I started speaking to Jackie over Messenger calls. Then I heard she was going through a really rough time. I decided to write her a poem about her, called it Jackie, and about how amazing she is and why she needs to be in this world and her life.

I put it in my second book, Stand By Me RP Volume 2, without telling her. When the book was released, I then sent her one of the first copies and then called her on the day when she received it. Anyway, in 2019, when I was doing my first USA book tour, the family traveled all the way from Amarillo in Texas to Baltimore where I was speaking at a convention and brought Jackie. It was the first time the family had ever left the state, and they traveled all the way over to meet me and I got to meet Jackie.

Jillian Comstock:

That’s awesome.

Dave Steele:

Sat with her and I’m still in touch with the family now. She’s just about 13 now.

Jillian Comstock:

Wow.

Dave Steele:

But yeah, having little connections like that with people through the poetry is incredible.

Jillian Comstock:

Oh my gosh. That is amazing that you were able to help her in that way. Genuinely.

Dave Steele:

There’s so many little connections like that where it’s literally saved people’s lives.

Jillian Comstock:

Yeah, literally. It’s just mind-blowing, honestly. For my last and final question, what would you tell your younger self knowing what you know now?

Dave Steele:

That’s a great question. One I have been asked a few times before, but I would just kind of remind myself that actually on the times and the days that we struggle, that when we struggle the most, we tend to beat ourselves up. You kind of referred to it before in one of your earlier statements. We go hard on ourselves and actually we get frustrated, and that can be the worst of it. Actually when I remind myself that the way that I’m feeling when I’m having one of my bad eye days or down days, it’s perfectly normal and perfectly natural, and it just makes me human.

That actually nothing lasts forever. That these things come and go and they always pass is such an amazing thing. Actually combine that now with the poetry. When I’m at my lowest now I can take all those negative feelings and put it into a piece of poetry, which then in turn will with the click of a button go around the world and help somebody else.

Jillian Comstock:

Right.

Dave Steele:

It turns it into a positive. Even on my darkest days, I know now. I just remind myself that.

Jillian Comstock:

That’s beautiful. Thank you, Dave, for your authenticity and vulnerability today. It has been an absolute joy getting to share your story today. You are truly a hero, and here at My Hero 360, we value and appreciate the impact you have made on the world. Thank you.

Dave Steele:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jillian Comstock:

You’re welcome.

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Connect with Dave Steele:

• Instagram: @theblindpoetofficial
• YouTube: @DaveSteeleTheBlindPoet
• X/Twitter: @TheBlindPoetX
• Website: theblindpoet.net

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