At 53, this visually impaired junior chef with lupus is pursuing her dream of becoming a stage actress
After she lost her eyesight at 19, Odilia Ser thought her dream of becoming an actress was destroyed. Decades later, she’s reigniting that passion and making her stage debut in the play, The Human Condition. She tells CNA Women what inspired her.
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Odilia Ser is acting in a theatre performance – but unlike most performers, she does not need light to get around.
She is blind in her left eye, and retains only five to 10 per cent of her vision in her right eye, with dark patches clouding her view. She can only make out bright, high-contrast colours and must angle her gaze carefully to avoid the blind areas.
She was 19 when her vision began to fade, and along with it, her dream of becoming an actress. So she put that dream aside, learnt braille, and took courses to enable to earn a living as a visually impaired person.
Now, decades later, the 53-year-old, who also works as a junior chef in a hotel preparing ingredients for the chef, will make her stage debut at the Enabling Lives Festival, from Nov 30 to Dec 3. The festival, organised by SG Enable, aims to promote accessibility, diversity, and inclusion in Singapore.
She plays a foster mother to a boy with a disability in the ART:DIS play, The Human Condition. Performed in three parts, the play is based on verbatim interviews with people with disabilities about the struggles they face.
LIVING FOR HER LOVED ONES
Ser was in secondary school when she began experiencing fatigue and body aches. She saw a general practitioner, who prescribed painkillers: “It didn’t really help, but I just tahan (tolerated it).”
A few months into her studies at the National Institute of Commerce, a vocational institute, the then-19-year-old realised she could not see what was written on the whiteboard in class.
Her parents then took her to the hospital. There, she found out she had systemic lupus erythematosus, or lupus – an autoimmune disease that explained her earlier discomfort, as its symptoms include constant fatigue and body aches.
Lupus can also cause eye damage. “The doctor told me that there was bleeding inside my eyes, the blood vessels there burst,” Ser said.
“He told me I was likely going to lose my sight, that I may not be able to see anymore,” she added. “When I heard that, my world collapsed.”
What broke Ser’s heart was realising that she couldn’t pursue her many dreams.
“There were so many things I wanted to do after I got my O Level certificate,” she told CNA Women. “I wanted to learn to drive, I loved Mandarin so I wanted to write in Chinese, I wanted to become a deejay, work in the media, or perform on TV or on stage – all cannot do anymore when I found out I couldn’t see.”
