VLADIMIR VASKEVICH

There will be a quite big introduction here, 

for, without being afraid of tautologies, I must say that the new hero of “Special Beauty” is extremely special for me. 

In the spring of 2018, I received a message on the VKontakte network in which I was thoroughly and respectfully offered to cooperate — to help create the cover of his first book, Journey Without Borders. Only after skimming through the list of Vova’s activities, I realized that I would consider the very fact of meeting and talking with him as luck. More so, helping him with my creativity.

It’s funny to remember now, but we took that picture in the parking lot of the Yekaterinburg Circus (don’t ask why, I don’t remember myself). The book was published just a few months later, and Vova became a participant in the first season of the project “Special Beauty”. And he said touching things at the opening of my first exhibition. I can’t call him a friend in the full sense of the word (I would like to, of course). This term requires more regular communication (and with Vova’s pace of life, only a few are awarded such an honor — a wife, for example). However, I can call him a comrade, and in some ways a mentor with pleasure and pride.

I’ve only seen one year in my life. The first.

There are no memories of this. So, you can say, I have never seen.

At the age of three, I had both eyes removed because of  retinal cancer. 

Of course, it was a tragedy for my parents. But they did everything to make my childhood truly happy and fulfilling. 

I even managed to play football with the guys in the yard (a life hack is to put the ball in a bag and navigate by its rustle).

The main scourge of all disabled people is extra guardianship of loved ones.

It is extremely important to minimize this so that a person can cope with most of his life on his own. No pity, no excessive care, maximum independence. I am very grateful to my family for the fact that they managed to maintain a balance in this. 

However, the blind are special children and require special education. 

Therefore, when I was 7, my parents made the difficult decision to send me a thousand kilometers from my hometown  to the specialized boarding school named after Martirosyan, one of the best schools for the blind and visually impaired in the country. 

After boarding school, there was a university. I went to an unadapted university, chose a specialty that no blind person had studied before. It was a mixture of programming, economics, marketing at the Higher School of Economics and Management. 

I had to get out a lot — it was a serious school of life. 

Imagine when you are given a project in 3ds Max, and you are blind. Both teachers and fellow students helped me.

Once a week I went to a math tutor just to show him what I had photographed at a lecture  and he explained what he had seen to me.

The ability to negotiate, to find compromises is the main result of this education.

So, I was a student (that is, I had no money) — and I wanted to “see the world”. 

And I decided to start hitchhiking. 

At first I tried hitchhiking with sighted friends. I traveled around several European countries in this way, and after that I started traveling alone. I realized that this is a great way not only for budget travel, but also the opportunity to hear a lot of interesting stories from locals. 

As a blind person, it is not beautiful landscapes and sights that are important to me,  picturesque  and emotional stories about them. As a rule, such stories you can hear from locals and truckers a lot

The most difficult and the most important for me was to learn to trust  the world and people. It often seemed to me that everyone was trying to deceive me, I was always expecting some kind of trick, danger.

One story helped me:

once in Yekaterinburg I got out of the subway. I had to walk about 300 meters to the bus stop. And then someone grabs me by the collar and starts dragging me somewhere, saying in a confident bass voice: “Bro, don’t fuck off, we’ll break through! Seryoga has a day of good deeds today!”. I tried to dissuade the unexpected benefactor, but he was determined. 

Seryoga didn’t know what phrase to use to inform me that there were steps ahead, so he cheerfully announced: “Bro, there’s going to be a BIG DROP!”. Then he noticed a young lady very attractive, apparently and began to passionately describe her to me in all details. He got carried away with the process so much that he immediately drove me into the pillar, and in his defense he said philosophically: “Sorry, bro, but you understand yourself  women are nothing but problems.” 

This story finally convinced me that there are more good people.

The world is open and it is beautiful. 

And if there are difficulties, most people will be happy to help you with their solution. Even in the case of a “Big drop”. 

I understood this only with time  and experience. So now I am alone in the vast majority of trips. And this is the excitement  because then I communicate with the locals, who are very willing to talk about their native places, show secret places, take me to their favorite places, share the tricks of going to the market, using local transport and all that you won’t find in guidebooks.

I have a training walk “Journey in the dark”

I conduct it in any cities of Russia and the world. In 2 hours with my help you are completely
reboot, plunging into the world of the blind. We walk around the city, chat, have lunch at a restaurant. You’ve been blindfolded all this time. Sometimes I combine such a walk with a coaching session. 

My task is to become a guide of a person in the dark, as a metaphor of  life with its uncertainty.

This is a way out of the comfort zone, triggering the mechanism of “brain movement” in a person, because in such a non-standard situation, the brain is forced to turn on to the maximum. My goal is to bring a person to a result and fix in him a sense of triumph that can help him cope with further tasks in life. 

I myself am still afraid of a lot, but it is important to understand that

most of our fears are a matter of practice. 

The first time is creepy, the fifth is familiar, the twenty—fifth is already automatically. 

Now I may not notice two transfers at airports at all. Once they wildly terrified me. Now I fully wake up already at the destination. What happens if you are late? Well, at most, you will lose money. Most likely, you won’t die from it.

Over the past seven years, I have traveled to 28 countries, visited 60 regions of Russia, won the program “I Can” on Channel One, got married, wrote a book, started writing a second one, earned my first apartment, moved to live in St. Petersburg, filmed a travel show. 

I skydived, steered a steam locomotive, sailed on a yacht in the Mediterranean Sea, rowed across Siberia (600 km in 16 days), dived to a depth of 20 meters, spent the night in the African desert, participated in a fire show, climbed mountains, milked mares, was robbed in Paris, fell asleep on an anthill in The Hague and was arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport. 

All these events dilute my reality with bright colors and help me feel life in its entirety.

But once I was not even hired as a cosmetics sales manager.