In this episode of The Hope & Health podcast, Mathew Embry talks with Ashley about navigating this sudden and life-changing shift, redefining independence, and rebuilding her sense of self. She shares how creativity became her way forward, first through her stage play and later through her award-winning podcast Static: A Party Girl’s Memoir, adapted from that show to share her remarkable story.
Today we're talking to Ashley King, writer, performer, and creator of "Static: A Party Girl's Memoir." Ashley's story is one of unbelievable resilience. At 19, while backpacking through Bali, she was poisoned by methanol in an illegally served drink. Most people die from methanol poisoning, but Ashley survived, losing her eyesight in the process. Now, 14 years later, she shares how she's transformed tragedy into purpose through storytelling and advocacy.
Ashley had been backpacking and living in Australia for five or six months, experiencing independence for the first time at 18. She was living her best life, seeing what it was like to be an adult away from home, imagining what her future would hold. Maybe she'd pursue acting more seriously. Maybe she'd change her university plans. The possibilities felt endless.
Then, on her last night in Bali, she went out for a drink, doing what most people do on vacation. She had no idea that methanol poisoning was something that happened in Bali, something she needed to be aware of or wary of. There was no one to blame, and yet she couldn't help wondering if she should blame herself.
The poison didn't take effect immediately. It was about 50 hours later, after she'd traveled to New Zealand, that symptoms appeared. Ashley was fortunate to be hospitalized in New Zealand rather than in a developing country where resources and English speaking staff might not be available. This timing likely saved her life, but it couldn't save her sight.
Being told you should be thankful because you could have died, but now you're blind, it's hard to feel grateful. This wasn't something Ashley thought she'd put herself in a precarious position for. It felt like something that happened out of nowhere, leaving her blind at 19, unable to drive the car she'd left at home, unable to do her serving job, unable to attend university as planned.
Methanol poisoning happens all around the world, especially in developing countries. It's super prominent in Southeast Asia, but occurs in Greece, India, Brazil, and many other places. In countries where alcohol isn't as regulated as in developed nations like Canada, restaurants, bars, and hotels often buy alcohol off the black market.
This homemade alcohol is being distilled, sometimes properly, but often improperly. During the distillation of hard alcohol, there's meant to be a portion that should be removed because it can contain methanol. Sometimes it's not removed. In other cases, industrial methanol is actually added to raise the volume so there's more liquid to sell.
The problem is that many of these bars and restaurants in developing countries are owned by individuals more concerned about money than the safety of their patrons. When contaminated alcohol is served, it smells no different and tastes no different than ethanol. It can take anywhere from immediately up to 72 hours for effects to appear.
Methanol poisoning has about an 80% mortality rate. Most people die from it. When poisoned in developing countries, victims often must be hospitalized where English isn't spoken and resources or staff to treat appropriately may not exist. It's westerners and locals who end up dying.
Just about a year ago, six backpackers in Laos were all poisoned by methanol and died, along with others who were poisoned and went blind or had other lasting effects. Ashley has posted about it on social media, made videos, and shared her experience. It took her 13 years to properly share it publicly, and she's realized how many people she's opened their eyes to, quote unquote, about methanol poisoning who didn't know about it before.
The medical system was difficult for Ashley. She feels like she really fell through the cracks. When she tells her story to folks in the medical system today, they're always quite shocked.
She was hospitalized in New Zealand, and for them to release her as a patient, they wanted her to transfer to Canada and instantly start seeing doctors. But when they transferred her, Canadian doctors treated her like she was on a wait list to see a specialist. She'd just gone blind and didn't have an appointment for two months. Her eyesight started changing even more and she started losing more of it before she finally got to see a doctor. They said, "Oh wow, we should have seen you right away." Yeah, probably.
There was no rehab for her. The best they had was directing her to the CNIB (Canadian National Institution for the Blind), a non profit with high turnover that, while doing great work, only has so much money to help their clients. Ashley found that when she went blind, it was a lot of her just figuring things out on her own. There were a couple things recommended, like grants to apply for, but it was mostly her figuring out different methods for how to cook, how to do makeup in the mornings.
The medical system wasn't of great help compared to now. She recently had an eye appointment where her doctor is very engaged and curious about ways glasses or AI glasses might help. She didn't have that engagement when she first lost her eyesight. It was more like, here's an antidepressant because it's going to be hard, and send her on her way.
After the tears, Ashley's initial response was denial. She thought she could still do everything. She believed she could take a taxi downtown to meet friends for dinner, then walk across the street to 7-Eleven. She believed she could see more than she actually could.
When she tried doing those things, she realized she was putting herself in really unsafe situations. In the first couple months, she was hit by a taxi. She was in denial about how blind she actually was.
She didn't want to ask for help. She struggled with it now, but when it first happened, she absolutely did not want to ask for help. She didn't want to be a burden, and she didn't want to tell anybody she was blind. So she'd lie, saying she wasn't wearing her contacts or she'd just had Lasik eye surgery.
Ashley admits she had her own internal ableism that she'd never had to deal with before. She was worried about how people were going to treat her with a disability. And people did treat her differently. But she was so worried about how she probably would have treated somebody who was blind that she expected everyone to treat her poorly, think she was weird or different, not want to be her friend.
She also had the issue where people wouldn't believe she was blind when she'd finally tell them, because she doesn't give off the stereotypical idea perpetuated in pop culture. She doesn't wear sunglasses, doesn't have a cane, doesn't have a dog. Most people think she's always really intoxicated or that something else is wrong, not possibly a visual impairment.
How do you first deal with sudden disability? You struggle. You try to find normalness, routine, and structure. Ashley had no routine, no structure. She couldn't just go to a job every day like she was used to before leaving. She wasn't going to university.
Trying to find accessible technology was a challenge when she didn't know anything. She had a Blackberry at the time, which isn't accessible. She didn't have support telling her that Apple is actually super accessible, that an iPad would be helpful. It was a lot of trial and fail, over and over.
Ashley was really surprised by how challenging accessibility issues were. Looking at what she can do on her phone in 2025, it's amazing compared to 2012. A lot of the technology available or quote unquote available back then cost $4,000 or $2,000. First she had to get a new iPhone, which cost money. Then an iPad, more money. She didn't have it and her family maybe didn't have it either.
Now there are apps that are so helpful, AI that's really helpful. She has many more accessible tools in her toolkit and can almost do everything on her own. But there was so much she couldn't do at that time, and she didn't want to ask for help.
Ashley didn't gravitate toward a community of people struggling with similar things. Folks she was meeting through the CNIB weren't necessarily her age demographic. She felt like nobody knew what it was like to be 19 and blind.
Now with social media, she could literally Google that and find somebody on TikTok talking about it. But at the time, no one was doing that on social media or YouTube. When she says she felt like the only person in the world going through what she was experiencing, she means it.
Not to mention it was because of methanol poisoning. There weren't many other methanol poisoning victims she knew around the world. She tried looking online to find other people this had happened to, maybe they'd gotten their eyesight back, maybe they could tell her how they worked through it.
She felt like she needed a support group. If she had cancer, there'd be a support group. But there was no support group for methanol poison victims who went blind. Most people she was finding were dying from methanol poisoning. So she was also faced with the idea that she wasn't being grateful to be alive.
She turned to friends she had at the time, many of whom are still her friends today. But she obviously lost a lot of friends as well. When you're 19 or 20, you don't know how to be there for yourself, let alone for someone who's gone through something so extraordinarily difficult. Friends and family didn't know how to be there for her, and she didn't know what to ask for and didn't want to ask for help.
If Ashley went blind today, there would be more resources in terms of technology, more advocacy through social media, more interconnectedness with different communities. She has a community of blind folks around her now, a community of methanol poisoning folks. Her friends totally understand and get her. She knows how to advocate for her visual impairment way better now.
Ashley's coping mechanisms in those early years? She didn't really have any. She refused therapy. Now that she's properly gone to therapy and talked in nauseam about everything, she knows what her triggers are when it comes to not feeling independent, having to depend on somebody.
But when it first happened, she did not want to go to therapy, did not want to talk about how to cope, did not want to hear that she was resilient or brave or strong. She listened to a lot of Netflix. She probably daydreamed about what she wanted her life to look like. She didn't have coping mechanisms, which is probably why she struggled so much.
She highly recommends that if you go through something as traumatic as losing your eyesight or gaining a sudden disability, find those coping mechanisms because they'd probably be very helpful.
Five years after losing her sight, Ashley ended up hospitalized for self harm, for not wanting to deal with it anymore. On the outside, her life looked normal and healthy. She'd gone to university, graduated, had a job, had a partner. But what she was actually feeling inside was that she was struggling a lot.
This became the ultimate point of asking for help. She'd always been so bad at asking for help, always wanting to believe she could be at 100% capacity like an average sighted person. She had to realize that her capacity may not be that of a fully sighted person, but also her capacity might be just fine the way it is.
Ending up in the hospital was a turning point. She realized she needed to see a therapist to talk about the trauma of losing her eyesight. If you've gone through something really horrible, that sucks, and you should be allowed to feel that way.
Ashley's life changed when she decided to tell her own story. She created "Static: A Party Girl's Memoir," a one woman play that she later turned into a podcast. Both have received awards and been incredibly well received.
She admits she still feels like an impostor, still struggles when people ask what she does. She very much downplays her accomplishments until someone with her rephrases everything to properly convey what she's actually achieved. She feels awkward taking up space, even though she encourages everybody else to do so.
But the impact has been undeniable. Telling her story authentically, completely leaning into her visual impairment, being this loud, wild, blind person that she is, has made the most difference. Not someone else's story, her story.
Ashley believes her life's purpose has evolved. Right now, storytelling is her purpose. Connecting people is her purpose. Advocating for those with disabilities and for methanol poisoning awareness is her purpose. Making people laugh by being on stage, on a podcast, in whatever creative endeavor she's doing.
She has more purpose now than she thinks she's ever had in her entire life. She doesn't know if she would have found this purpose had she not gone blind. She thinks she would have lived a more selfish, mundane life. Losing her eyesight allowed her to find purpose.
She's exactly where she wants to be. She just took a really weird roundabout way to get here.
Ashley has fewer memories of being sighted than being non sighted now. In a couple years, she'll have been sighted as long as she's been non sighted. The monumental moments of her life, graduating from university, having relationships, accomplishing things in her twenties, she did all of that non sighted.
The more she takes off her bucket list, the more she accomplishes, the more she realizes she can live this life with a visual impairment. There's no cure. There's nothing that's going to bring her eyesight back one day. Science is always changing, maybe, but she had to give up that hope and accept that if this is what her life is going to look like forever, can she find purpose and a reason to exist despite her visual impairment.
She describes disability as an ongoing, ever changing relationship. It's not something you get over or move past. Her other option was to not be here anymore. So she moved forward by checking things off a to do list. She wanted to go to university, so she found a way. She wanted to keep traveling, so she went on that first trip, though she definitely needed good friends around her to do it.
People meet her today or hear her podcast or see her play and say she's so resilient, she's accomplished so much. But they didn't see her when it was really bad, when she was mean to people, angry, jealous that others could see and she couldn't, jealous of fun things people do in their early 20s that she couldn't do or wasn't getting invited to because it was different hanging out with her now.
She was mad that she felt robbed of her 20s and her youth. In that regard, she feels kind of behind her friends. They're all ready to have babies and get married, and she's only just thinking maybe that's what she wants. She had to sit in anger and sadness for years.
For someone experiencing sudden disability, Ashley's number one piece of advice is this: You don't have to be strong. Feel empowered to struggle.
In her experience, right off the bat people wanted to say how strong and brave she was, how she was making the most of a difficult situation. It felt like she always had to put on a face that she was okay with it, getting on and getting through. But really she was struggling by herself in her bedroom.
Disability can make other people uncomfortable. If you're okay and doing okay, then they can be okay too. But what would have helped her accept it faster was being more honest that she wasn't okay. Otherwise, years later you're breaking down, being hospitalized, and everyone's shocked because they thought you were doing great.
Ashley now works for a deaf and disabled theatre company in Calgary. Being around the conversation of disability more often has allowed her to be more comfortable speaking about it, about what she needs in a moment, what her boundaries are.
Recently at a restaurant with girlfriends, the staff told her friends they couldn't serve Ashley because she was intoxicated. Her friends explained she was visually impaired, that's why she was holding onto them. When Ashley ordered wine, the server refused, saying she was clearly too intoxicated. Her friends got upset, but Ashley initially tried to brush it off, not wanting to ruin the night.
Then she started crying. Her friends gave her space to not be okay. Ashley a couple years ago would have bitten her tongue, sat there feeling uncomfortable, bad, and judged, had a really bad night but kept it to herself.
Having a really great support system that allows you to feel all the feels is crucial. After that night, Ashley was supposed to attend an event the next day but gave herself permission to stay home, lay in bed with her dog, so she could show up better on Monday rather than carry the pain all week.
For someone who has an accident, is poisoned, or is diagnosed with a chronic illness and feels like their life is over, Ashley's message is clear: It's not over. Your life is just going to look different.
There was life before losing her eyesight, but there's also life after. Unfortunately, it is what you make it. The more you accomplish, the more you set off and do, the more you realize you can do everything you did prior. It just looks a little bit differently. Maybe you need extra help. Maybe you'll find a different purpose that you didn't know was there.
Ashley hopes to see her podcast continue in another iteration more focused on methanol poisoning awareness. She's hoping to travel her play to other cities. She hopes to continue making art and spreading awareness about disability and methanol poisoning.
Most importantly, she hopes to open doors for other folks who will come after her, people hoping to do something similar to what she's done. She has a lot of privilege in her situation and has been given opportunities she doesn't take for granted. If she can offer that to somebody else, provide guidance she could have used when she lost her eyesight, she hopes to do that.
Fourteen years after going blind at 19, Ashley King has transformed tragedy into purpose. Through storytelling, advocacy, and the courage to be vulnerable, she's not just surviving, she's creating meaningful change for herself and others navigating sudden disability.
