inSight Out

inSight Out is a podcast for people affected by vision loss and those who care about them. If vision loss has you feeling alone, scared, angry, uncertain, disconnected, or simply confused, you're in the right place. Your host, Matthew Reeves, is a legally blind Georgia-licensed therapist and nationally certified rehabilitation counselor who specializes in helping people adjust to disability. Matthew’s personal experiences help him connect with others who are figuring out what it means to live well with low or no vision. You'll learn about healthy, practical, impactful tools to build and maintain a truly rich and gratifying life—regardless of your level of vision.

inSight Out is a health podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 29 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts inSight Out, a health show with 29 episodes published.

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  Episode #30

  030 Today's Not the Day, Tomorrow Might Be with Jennifer Frederick

  Sep 30, 202646 min

  In this episode of inSight Out, host Matthew Reeves talks with Jennifer Frederick, a 48-year-old woman from New York's Capital Region who lost most of her vision to diabetic retinopathy five years ago, at age 43. Jennifer describes the early signs she initially explained away, doubled-up reading glasses, an unfamiliar floater, a gas station display she suddenly couldn't read, and the rapid string of referrals that followed, ending in a prognosis of legal blindness. Jennifer walks Matthew through what came next: resigning from a highly visual job in emergency tech support with the full support of an understanding employer, a Social Security disability application that moved through in months rather than years, and the orientation and mobility training, assistive technology, and cane use that reshaped her daily life. She's candid about the internalized stigma she initially felt toward the cane and how it became, over time, something she now calls an extension of herself, along with the moment she spoke up to request a different instructor when her first one wasn't the right fit. The conversation also covers a piece of Jennifer's story this show hasn't featured before: managing chronic kidney disease, a second complication of the type 2 diabetes behind her vision loss, alongside her adjustment to blindness. She talks about the fear that finally motivated real changes to her health, and about her recent move into advocacy work, sharing her story publicly and connecting people newly facing vision loss with resources she wishes she'd known about sooner. Contact Jennifer at 518-655-1615 or frennij@gmail.com Topics Covered: diabetic retinopathy, legal blindness, workplace disclosure, Social Security disability, orientation and mobility training, cane use and stigma, assistive technology, chronic kidney disease, self-advocacy, peer support and advocacy work. ABOUT THE PODCAST inSight Out is your podcast home for living well with vision loss. Host Matthew Reeves (LPC CRC NCC) is a legally-blind psychotherapist and rehabilitation counselor specializing in helping people thrive while living with disability. Matthew is licensed in Georgia and is a nationally certified rehabilitation counselor. CONNECT WITH US Podcast Home: https://insightoutpod.com Talk to Us: https://speakpipe.com/insightoutpod Email: insightoutpod@integralmhs.com Watch on YouTube (with transcripts): youtube.com/@insightoutpod Feed: https://www.insightoutpod.com/feed.xml Reddit Community: https://www.reddit.com/r/inSightOut/ Social Media Handle: @insightoutpod ©Integral Mental Health Services, LLC

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  Episode #28

  028 Stepping Out of the Driver's Seat with Janel Brooks

  Sep 2, 202655 min

  In this episode of inSight Out, host Matthew Reeves talks with Janel Brooks, an engineer at a Fortune 500 company who has lived with Stargardt disease for almost twenty years. Diagnosed in her twenties after a routine LASIK consultation revealed the condition, Janel describes an unusually smooth diagnosis followed by a much harder decade of watching her vision quietly worsen while she kept driving, working, and problem-solving her way around it, until a stoplight she couldn't fully make out became her first real warning sign. Janel walks Matthew through the guilt she carried before she finally quit driving in early 2018, the total restructuring of daily life that followed (walking to the grocery store, building thirty-minute buffers into every rideshare, treating errands as a shared family calendar rather than a solo task), and the moment her husband pushed back on being cast as her "helper" rather than her partner. The conversation turns toward her career, where Janel spent years hiding her vision loss out of fear it would stall her advancement, until a moment of crisis, walking into her regional manager's office to quit, led to an unplanned disclosure and a response that changed everything: "I do." His daughter has Stargardt's too. Matthew and Janel talk about the exhausting, ongoing work of asking for help, the power of using humor to put people at ease, and how choosing to disclose, rather than waiting to be found out, can become its own form of control. Janel also shares an unlikely story about becoming an emergency feline chaperone on a cross-country flight, a reminder that vision loss doesn't disqualify you from showing up for the people you love. Topics Covered: Stargardt disease, driving cessation and vision loss, disability disclosure at work, self-advocacy, reframing burden and independence, marriage and caregiving dynamics, humor as a coping tool, workplace accommodations, asking for help, community and podcast listenership. Reach Janel at janelzoo@yahoo.com. ABOUT THE PODCAST inSight Out is your podcast home for living well with vision loss. Host Matthew Reeves (LPC CRC NCC) is a legally-blind psychotherapist and rehabilitation counselor specializing in helping people thrive while living with disability. Matthew is licensed in Georgia and is a nationally certified rehabilitation counselor. CONNECT WITH US Podcast Home: https://insightoutpod.com Talk to Us: https://speakpipe.com/insightoutpod Email: insightoutpod@integralmhs.com Watch on YouTube (with transcripts): youtube.com/@insightoutpod Feed: https://www.insightoutpod.com/feed.xml Reddit Community: https://www.reddit.com/r/inSightOut/ Social Media Handle: @insightoutpod ©Integral Mental Health Services, LLC

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  Episode #27

  027 What "Chronic" Really Means with Rebecca Petris

  Aug 19, 20261h 2m

  On the surface, this episode of inSight Out is about dry eye. Underneath, it's about something every listener with low vision or blindness will recognize: what happens when a very real experience gets minimized because it doesn't fit the box other people expect it to fit. Host Matthew Reeves talks with Rebecca Petris, president of the newly renamed Dry Eye and Ocular Pain Foundation, about a condition that is chronically misunderstood by its own name. Rebecca explains why "dry eye" has become an unhelpful catch-all term, covering everything from casual irritation to severe, sight-threatening disease, and why her organization recently added "ocular pain" to its title to better capture what many patients actually live with. As Matthew and Rebecca discuss early on, plenty of people in the low vision and blind community carry some degree of ocular discomfort alongside their vision loss without ever naming it or having it taken seriously, which is exactly the kind of overlap this conversation is built to surface. Rebecca traces her own path into this work back to a 2001 LASIK surgery that left her with corneal damage and undiagnosed neuropathic pain. What started as one patient searching for answers online became a website, then an online community, and eventually a full-time career building support for people whose eye pain and vision problems come from wildly different causes but land in strikingly similar places: the powerlessness of not being believed, and the isolation of a body that no longer behaves the way it used to. She describes the foundation's helpline, where people who have often seen a dozen or more specialists without answers can finally be heard, and walks through how untreated eye pain compounds into financial, relational, and mental health crises, a pattern that will land as familiar to anyone who has navigated the medical system with vision loss. Matthew and Rebecca also have a candid conversation about suicidal ideation within the chronic pain and vision loss communities, and why Rebecca fought to keep the word "chronic" out of her field's official diagnostic language. It's a wide-ranging conversation that starts with a name nobody likes and ends up being about connection, validation, and what it actually means to accompany someone through a painful and uncertain diagnosis, whatever that diagnosis happens to be. You can reach the Dry Eye Helpline at 800-484-0244. Concerned about suicidal thoughts? Dial or text 9-8-8 to reach the national crisis hotline in the US. Topics Covered: dry eye disease, ocular surface pain, LASIK complications, chronic pain, medical trauma, patient advocacy, suicidal ideation, mental health and chronic illness, self-advocacy, accompaniment in illness. ABOUT THE PODCAST inSight Out is your podcast home for living well with vision loss. Host Matthew Reeves (LPC CRC NCC) is a legally-blind psychotherapist and rehabilitation counselor specializing in helping people thrive while living with disability. Matthew is licensed in Georgia and is a nationally certified rehabilitation counselor. CONNECT WITH US Podcast Home: https://insightoutpod.com Talk to Us: https://speakpipe.com/insightoutpod Email: insightoutpod@integralmhs.com Watch on YouTube (with transcripts): youtube.com/@insightoutpod Feed: https://www.insightoutpod.com/feed.xml Reddit Community: https://www.reddit.com/r/inSightOut/ Social Media Handle: @insightoutpod ©Integral Mental Health Services, LLC

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  Episode #26

  026 Breaking the Disclosure Dam with Ana Nosal

  Aug 5, 202649 min

  In this episode of inSight Out, host Matthew Reeves talks with Ana Nosal, a 30-year-old marathon runner from the Washington, D.C. area who was diagnosed with Stargardt disease at fourteen. Ana describes the early denial that came with starting high school just as her vision loss was confirmed, the accommodations she quietly refused to use, and the moment in college when giving up driving forced a new kind of acceptance. She also traces how her competitive life shifted, from soccer and softball, where her declining hand-eye coordination became too hard to ignore, to cross country and track, sports she could still control on her own terms. Much of the conversation centers on disclosure: why Ana told professors and friends only on a strict need-to-know basis for over a decade, how therapy, originally sought for grief after her father's death, eventually surfaced how much of her anxiety and self-esteem was tangled up in her vision loss, and how she and her therapist worked through worst-case and best-case scenarios before she told her boyfriend just two dates in. That practice run set the stage for the leap that followed: posting her story to social media all at once, rather than telling people one at a time. Ana and Matthew talk about what it's like to receive an outpouring of support you spent years bracing against, the guilt of wondering why you didn't trust people sooner, and the unexpected reward of helping other people, including partners, parents, and teachers, recognize vision loss they hadn't known how to see before. Topics Covered: Stargardt disease, disclosure and self-advocacy, adaptive sports, marathon running, grief counseling, generalized anxiety, self-esteem work, social media visibility, dating and disclosure, worst-case versus best-case thinking. Contact Ana at ana.m.nosal@gmail.com and follow her on IG or TicTok: @Ana_Nosal ABOUT THE PODCAST inSight Out is your podcast home for living well with vision loss. Host Matthew Reeves (LPC CRC NCC) is a legally-blind psychotherapist and rehabilitation counselor specializing in helping people thrive while living with disability. Matthew is licensed in Georgia and is a nationally certified rehabilitation counselor. Please be sure to subscribe to catch every episode. And remember to share the show with others in the blind and low-vision community! CONNECT WITH US Podcast Home: https://insightoutpod.com Talk to Us: https://speakpipe.com/insightoutpod Email: mailto:insightoutpod@integralmhs.com Watch on YouTube (with transcripts): youtube.com/@insightoutpod Feed: https://www.insightoutpod.com/feed.xml Reddit Community: https://www.reddit.com/r/inSightOut/ Social Media Handle: @insightoutpod ©Integral Mental Health Services, LLC

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  Episode #25

  025 Pursuing the Paralympics with Graham Rainsby

  Jul 22, 202655 min

  In this episode of inSight Out, host Matthew Reeves talks with Paralympic hopeful Graham Rainsby about losing most of his vision within a single year to Stargardt's disease, and the unlikely athletic career that followed. Diagnosed in sixth grade after his vision dropped from roughly 20/60 to 20/200, Graham describes the strange mix of denial and determination that got him through middle school, the accommodations that let him compete at the varsity level in high school and at Middlebury College, and the ongoing, exhausting calculus of deciding when and how to disclose a disability that isn't always visible at first glance. A knee injury at the end of his senior year ended Graham's running career, and after several years adrift, he picked up competitive swimming, setting an American record in the 50-meter butterfly in his very first race. He's now training toward the qualifying time for the 2028 Paralympic trials, and he opens up about the strange unsatisfying quiet of finishing a swim race blind, unable to see the clock or know how he placed until someone tells him. Matthew and Graham also dig into the difference between wanting to stand out because of a disability and refusing to be defined by it, why Graham still struggles to ask for enough support, and the philosophy that's carried him through two sports: that the value is in the pursuit, not the finish line. Topics Covered: Stargardt's disease, progressive vision loss, disability disclosure, self-advocacy, collegiate athletics, adaptive sport transition, Paralympic swimming, identity and disability, resilience, chasing long-term goals. Follow Graham on Instagram: @blindconfidences ABOUT THE PODCAST inSight Out is your podcast home for living well with vision loss. Host Matthew Reeves (LPC CRC NCC) is a legally-blind psychotherapist and rehabilitation counselor specializing in helping people thrive while living with disability. Matthew is licensed in Georgia and is a nationally certified rehabilitation counselor. Please be sure to subscribe to catch every episode. And remember to share the show with others in the blind and low-vision community! CONNECT WITH US Podcast Home: https://insightoutpod.com Talk to Us: https://speakpipe.com/insightoutpod Email: mailto:insightoutpod@integralmhs.com Watch on YouTube (with transcripts): youtube.com/@insightoutpod Feed: https://www.insightoutpod.com/feed.xml Reddit Community: https://www.reddit.com/r/inSightOut/ Social Media Handle: @insightoutpod ©Integral Mental Health Services, LLC

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