Dilara Earle: How I started vlogging with my best friend

Over the last 4 years, I’ve been creating videos for The Pickle Sandwich to raise awareness about living with a disability with my best friend, Justine.

Our mishaps and adventures have taken us to many corners of the world but we have always come out the other side better for it, so we decided to share how we do it, with whoever wants to come along for the ride.

When Justine and I first met in Sydney, we quickly realised that we had three things in common: we loved to travel, our birthdays are two days apart and we both had an invisible disability – she’s very blind, I’m really deaf.

I’d never met a blind person before, and Justine had never met someone who’s deaf. Soon, we were running into all sorts of pickles, the first being when a lady who was lost asked us for directions.

I had no idea what she had just said, so I asked Justine. What we didn’t anticipate is that she couldn’t read any of the street signs!

Over lunch we spontaneously decided to create a YouTube channel: The Pickle Sandwich.

Select the settings toolbar in the bottom right, then select ‘English subtitles’ (not auto-generated) to watch the video below with captions.

Because of our lives being spent facing comments such as ‘you’re too pretty to be deaf’ and ‘we should ask about disability the next time we interview‘ in full lipreading view and earshot, we decided it was high time to spread our wisdom online but with a twist of dry humour.

Our ‘Bullying Month’ video has been shown in schools to highlight how often disabilities are used to single people out. But we didn’t want to depict only our suffering but our funniest tales and how we have overcome society’s challenges.

Most of our videos delve into light-hearted topics such as the worst kind of dates for a blind and deaf person or how to take the piss out of us and still have a laugh together.

Once Justine didn’t realise a guy she had been flirting with all night had two front teeth knocked out, not to mention the time I smiled, accidentally, through a date’s conversation about his colleague’s death…

When I left Sydney, it became harder to film our chats but that evolved into road trip chats, as we ticked off the South Island in New Zealand.

Although we only managed to find the glaciers after six hours, not the three hours that Google maps had so generously claimed. It was dark by the time we arrived, which brought on a fit of hysterical laughter as we agreed that Justine shouldn’t climb a mountain full of scree in the pitch black when she has no night rods in her eyes.

Highlights in Spain included a traditional hamam – after we held hands slipping and sliding all over the tiles, stumbling through the steam.

The guide was much bemused as to why we didn’t pay any attention to him, as I couldn’t hear a single thing and was too busy keeping Justine away from the edges of the pools. Justine was too busy trying to tell me in pidgin sign language what he was saying with one hand as I quite literally became the deaf leading the blind.

At the end of every trip, though, we always turn to each other and confess how lucky we are to experience the world at large, even if it might take us on some detours.

What do we hope for in 2019? Visiting and discovering new countries and cultures are never too far from our plans! We would love to make a documentary one day about visiting our countries of heritage that we did not grow up in: Turkey, Lebanon, Latvia and Italy, to see what life as a blind or deaf person is like there.

Until then, you can catch us at The Pickle Sandwich discussing food, jobs, dates, and dreams, just like any two best friends.