​Mizzou

that she cannot see. The sea waves on her thigh connect her to the ocean, while the rock hammer on her ankle symbolizes her dedication to her area of study, geology. She got the quote, “Hope without fear without regret,” before coming to MU. The bass clef in her ear represents her obsession with perception and music.

 

“I talk to my deaf friends, and I’m like, ‘How do you guys survive without rock 'n' roll?’” Ceylan said, laughing.

 

Ceylan, a graduate student at MU, has never seen her tattoos because of a progressive retinal condition she’s had since she was born, leaving her more and more blind as she has grown older.

 

After slowly losing her sight for years, Ceylan woke up one morning in 2009 to an almost complete loss of vision. Her way of life was about to shift, but instead of sulking about what she had lost, Ceylan began to view her situation in a positive light.

 

Ceylan started to adopt an entirely new way of perceiving, providing her with a unique opportunity to exercise what she calls a “resilience that most people aren’t challenged into.”
 
She said that in addition to learning tools that make her life easier, including Braille and text-to-speech software, she has also learned an entirely new way of living and thinking, something she would never trade for 20/20 vision.
 
“That unique way of perceiving is very valuable, and I find in that a lot of richness and opportunity to grow (and) adapt,” Ceylan said.
 
Ceylan’s positivity and distinct way of thinking have begun to seep into the MU campus through the various organizations and classes in which Ceylan takes part.
 
She has worked with MU's branch of Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning, a network of 23 universities interested in improving undergraduate education in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. These universities strive to accomplish this by improving future faculty, or current graduate students. One of the center’s foundational ideals is “learning through diversity,” and it is here that Ceylan has offered up her expertise.
 
“We tend to obsess over these things like race, ethnicity and language, but forget about the other ways in which we are diverse,” she said.
 
For Ceylan, it’s all about these diversities or in her words “diverse abilities.”
 
Especially for her students, Ceylan said, they hear the phrase “diverse abilities” and “it just doesn’t have that tragic, sad, something’s-wrong-with-you connotation.”
 
She said her students have taken the phrase and given it meaning, realizing that their individual diversities have value.  It’s this appreciation of ones self that Ceylan stresses the most.
 
“Regardless of your diverse ability, where you come from, what you do, human beings, we always have some way of perceiving and taking in what’s going on around us,” she said. “And as long as we can do that in some way, we can appreciate some aspect of what’s going on. That appreciation drives this process of problem solving. And it’s overly simplistic but: perceive, appreciate, act, express.”
 
Even so, Ceylan says that expressing what she’s thinking is her hardest challenge, when it comes to teaching and being a student at MU.
 
“(You'd expect it) to be a challenge associated with blindness,” she said. “And there are plenty of challenges associated with that, but actually my largest challenge is being incredibly cognitively different. It’s often hard for me to communicate effectively and to really clarify my ideas to other people. You’d think it’d be perception because I’m blind, but it’s actually communicating.”
 
Whether it’s communicating or perceiving, it seems whatever challenges Ceylan has to face, she learns how to push forward. She has found ways to express herself, whether that be through academic writing or her gaggle of tattoos.
 
Her very first tattoo, a black rose on her back, symbolizes the parts of her life she has left behind, but hasn’t forgotten.
 
“To me, it’s just a permanent way of expressing things that are very meaningful to me,” she said.
 
For Ceylan, someone who has had to learn an entirely new way of expression, it really is that simple: