Tag Archives: Blindness

Adopt a Little Blind Girl

Free to good home:  one Little Blind Girl, lightly used.  This rare and exotic breed is known for its endearing clutziness, comically mis-matched clothing, and inconveniently good hearing.  This particular Little Blind Girl is fully housebroken and ready for show.  Her skills include running in four-inch heels, applying makeup with her eyes closed, and finding creative ways to reach the highest shelf.  As with most Little Blind Girls, her diet consists primarily of raw foods, though this specimen has mastered the art of boiling an egg and has demonstrated prodigious skills with the microwave.

Prospective owners must demonstrate their ability to care for a Little Blind Girl, including extensive first-aid skills and the ability to get condiment stains out of dry-clean only clothing.  All applicants must show proof of ownership of a high-end stereo system and be trained to handle the occasional tantrum when the Little Blind Girl gets a new toy but can’t read the assembly instructions written in 6-point font.

Little Blind Girls are well-known for their easy-going attitudes regarding what channel of television to watch, though they can develop attachments to certain actors if seen before their vision problems set in.  This Little Blind Girl will insist on watching anything with Johnny Depp.  Should a Pirates of the Caribbean marathon come on the air, do not attempt to get between the Little Blind Girl and the screen unless properly attired in protective gear.  Simply supply her with popcorn and Milk Duds, check on her at commercial breaks, and wait for the marathon to end, at which point the Little Blind Girl will resume her normal behavior patterns.  She is very loving and affectionate and would be a good addition to any home.  Except one with small children, which she will not see and may possibly step on.  Please leave a comment if interested.

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Some days are harder than others

Most days, I’m not afraid of going blind.  I’ve heard words of doom pronounced before, only to be rescinded, and I know when to panic and when not to.  I’m doing what I should be doing to preserve the vision I have, and there are new developments all the time that give me hope.

But some days are hard.  Some days I get so scared, thinking that the darkness is going to fall at some point and never lift again.  There will be a sunset that will be the last one I see, a ray of light that will falter and fade until the shadows swallow it completely, until they swallow me completely.  I’ll never see the sun again, never see another flower, never see the faces of the people I love.  I’ll walk in darkness for the rest of my life.  I know, I know that there’s so much that’s worse.  I could be dying.  This could be happening to someone I love, instead of to me.  But when I wake up in the middle of the night to pitch black and think, someday this is what the world will look like to me at noon, that doesn’t help much.

I love light.  I love the sun, the way it can be so far away, spinning and burning, and still light up entire worlds.  I love daffodils, which I’ve always thought look like sunlight made into a flower.  I love to see my niece’s face and how it changes as she grows, always more beautiful every time I see her, and it breaks my heart that I may not be able to see her as a woman.  I want to see her face.  I want to see the face of my sister when she looks at her daughter.  How often do you get to see happiness absolutely undiluted?  But I’ve seen it.  How can it be that I may someday never see it again?

But I can hear my niece laugh.  I can hear my sister joking with her and being stern with her and loving her; I can hear her father being so funny and patient and good-hearted, and I don’t need to see any of them to know what kind of a woman she’s going to be with parents like that.  I can recognize amazing in any language, with my eyes closed and both hands behind my back.  And I have time to memorize the faces of everyone I love.  I have time to sit by the daffodils and see the way they bloom as if they’re reaching for something, maybe reaching for the sun, like me.  I promise you, I will be watching the sun come up every day I can still see it and I’ll turn my face to the sky like those daffodils, and when my eyes fail me altogether I may walk in darkness, but I’ll dream of light.

I’m grateful for the time, and I’m grateful that it isn’t worse.  It’s just hard to be brave when you know what’s coming, and it comes little by little every day.

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Way more fun than the truth

I’m always getting unexplained bruises and scratches.  It’s hard to avoid the edge of the coffee table when it’s made of glass and you’re legally blind–for which the lesson is probably something like, don’t buy a glass coffee table if you’re legally blind, but that’s another post.  I don’t even remember how I get these things, but they show up regularly on my legs, arms, neck, face, all over.  People exclaim over them:  “Oh, no!  How did you get that bruise?”  And when I tell them I don’t know, they totally look at me like they think I’m being abused.  Which I’m not, but that’s kind of a lengthy explanation to give to a random person who’s just asking about that bruise under my ear that I think I might have gotten when I tripped over the bathmat that got bunched up and I fell into the towel rack, but I’m really not sure and it might have been from when I was trying to get a can off the top shelf in the kitchen and I lost my balance and smacked myself with the cabinet door.

So I think I’m just going to have fun with it.  “Oh, that one?  This kid I was babysitting tried a karate chop on me, but he stopped when I drop-kicked him across the room.”  Or, “that scratch?  I was giving a performance art exhibition and one of the pulleys snapped, and the yak horn went right through my scuba suit!”  Or, “It’s that guy from the pretzel kiosk. Can you believe it?  I swore it would be the last time.” Just to see how people react.  Suggestions are welcome, as long as you don’t mind if I end up using them on you!

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Three and a half billion Brad Pitts

A blog by a blind girl?  How?  Why?  Well, the why is my friends who, when I said “Who would read a blog I wrote?”, answered “I would!”  We’ll see how that turns out.  The how is going to be a little more tricky, so please forgive typos.

I’ve always thought that being legally blind let me notice things that other people don’t–changes in people’s voices, the way the barks of different trees feel.  It’s actually pretty cool.  But there’s one phenomenon that I think I’m going to have to ask for feedback on: strangely, whenever I tell a guy that I can’t see what he looks like, he tells me he bears a striking resemblance to Brad Pitt.  This is not the case with women–I get all sorts of responses from them (interestingly, Jennifer Aniston is a more common response than Angelina Jolie).  I’m a little alarmed at the number of Brad Pitts out there, clogging the Abercrombie stores and adopting the world’s orphans willy nilly.  Please, guys, find someone else to resemble!  Poor Brad’s got to be a little tired of running into himself everywhere, and think how confusing it must be for Angie.

So tell me, my sighted friends:  is the world full of Brad Pitts?  It’s been a while since I could see properly, but I’m pretty sure that was not the case when I was young.

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