Victoria O - curating her life by Brett R

Using Creativity to build a life that both accommodates and inspires.

Victoria O. received a severe brain injury in 2004, which, among other challenges, resulted in significant loss of vision. Since then, she has applied her strong creative instincts in a practical way to build a living space that works for her. For example, in her kitchen, everything used to be white, but, with her impaired vision, she found that uniformity made it more difficult for her; how can you find the white plates in a white cabinet or on white counters? Now, she has a charmingly colourful collection of dinnerware. She has carefully replaced her home’s beige floor tiles with colourful ones to make it easier to literally navigate her surroundings and to spot tripping hazards. Recently, people have begun to ask her to consult on how to make their living environments more accommodating. We, at the Brainy Bugler, wanted to know how she became an expert? “I got very frustrated when what I needed wasn’t out there;” she said. “So, I decided to create it for myself.” That’s just what she’s been doing ever since. For instance, sometimes Victoria is not sure whether or not she has turned off her stove so she set up a cell phone with its camera facing her stove. Then, she configured another phone to see through the first phone’s camera so that at any time whether in another room, on the bus, or at CHIRS, she can check her stove.

The practical aspects of her living environment are only one part of how she is curating her home. She might not have a view of the ocean from her kitchen, but she has a beautiful and very colourful mural of a tropical beach covering most of one wall. And a lush forest covers another wall. With more and more people asking for her advice, we wondered how she keeps her energy up. “I am a child of nature,” she says. Every day she goes outside to hug a tree, all year round. That’s enough to charge her batteries, and we bet the trees like it too.

She has been a client at CHIRS since 2009 and regularly attends “Spill the T” journaling program on Friday mornings which gives her another opportunity to use her creativity, and to apply her wizard-like skills at word games.