This is a question I get a lot. Like a lot a lot. It’s right up there with how do you accomplish anything and tell me all about your dog.
Personally I don’t mind answering this question, though I admit that I don’t really understand either the question or my answer.
Let’s dig into this a bit.
First, I don’t mind answering this question because it helps people understand what I might need in any given situation. If I say that I have trouble seeing in dim surroundings, then yes, I could use a little more help in the D.C. metro. This isn’t to say that I can’t navigate the D.C. metro for myself just fine, but on the off-chance that I’m with a friend or a coworker and I would rather rely on their assistance at that moment, I want them to be able to help me as much as they can—and not too much.
So how much can I see? I’ve answered this question so many times that I pretty much just real it off. I can see light and shadows and color in my left eye. I can’t recognize faces, but I can read print if it’s 72 point font and my nose is pressed to the page or computer monitor (it’s not a good way to read, of course, but it gives someone who can see a solid way to understand what I can see). I don’t have any vision in my right eye, though I used to. Since I used to have vision in my right eye, I can describe what it’s like to be totally blind as well. For me, it isn’t so much black as nothing. Sometimes I still see flashes of color or spots of light, because phantom eye is a real thing and my brain is constantly trying to fill in. I like to describe what I see in my right eye as a hole in my vision. It means that when I’m watching TV or going to the movies, I like to sit on the far right, so the hole doesn’t get in the way. When I’m drawing, I use my left hand now, because otherwise the hole and my nose get in the way. I always finish my description about my vision by reiterating that I identify as blind because I read Braille and travel with a guide dog.
You might think this is a lot of detail to go into. Sometimes I don’t go into this much detail. I often don’t describe what it’s like to be totally blind unless someone asks me. But I will say that I can see light, colors, and shadows, that I could read print if it’s 72 point font and my nose is pressed against the screen, that I have more trouble in either bright or very dim areas, and that I travel with a Seeing Eye dog and read Braille.
I go into this much detail for a few reasons. Blindness is a difficult concept for someone who can see to even comprehend. It’s more than walking around with your eyes closed or even walking around blindfolded. You can open your eyes or take off the blindfold. If you’re blind, really blind, you have to adapt your whole life. It’s definitely doable, but to someone who can see, it’s unfathomable—doubly so because how blind people accomplish daily tasks is often a mystery to the sighted world. This means that there’s a lot of fear surrounding blindness.
Sidenote: This is why stunts where people put on blindfolds to simulate blindness are both insulting and damaging. For more on that, see this post I wrote a few years ago on the #HowEyeSeeIt campaign.
Another sidenote: part of the reason I’m doing this series of blog posts is to demystify how blind people do things.
The other reason I give so much detail is that people often automatically assume that I’m totally blind, and this can lead to them trying to give me a lot of help I don’t need. This isn’t a terrible problem. I make sure to communicate what I do and don’t need in any given situation. But sometimes I can head that conversation off at the pass with a description of what I can and can’t see. Sometimes it’s a way to start the conversation about what kind of help I need or the fact that I don’t need help at all.
It’s obvious when you think about it, but blindness isn’t an on-off switch. Some people are totally blind, but I know people who are visually impaired with drivers’ licenses. There are people who only have light perception, and people who only have trouble seeing at night. Some people can see color. Some people have vision that is slowly deteriorating. I’ve been in groups of blind people where I have the least amount of vision, but I’ve also been part of groups where I have the most. I have enough vision that among my blind friends, I can be the one guiding people around. But compared to a sighted person, I have barely any vision at all.
When someone asks how much I can see, I don’t mind answering. It’s a good conversation starter, and I think I’ve gotten my answer down to something that someone who can see can at least grasp. But I wonder how much my answer makes sense to someone who can see.
To me, the idea of 20/20 vision is incomprehensible. Recently, a friend who is totally blind said that she didn’t really enjoy long descriptions of the setting in books because she can’t picture them. I admit that my first reaction was to judge her for her lack of imagination, but then I realized I also imagine what I’m reading based on my vision. I have a vague idea of what people can see, based on descriptions in books, but when I envision what I’m reading or what I’m writing, I always see things the way I see things in real life. I don’t magically have perfect vision in my dreams or in my mind’s eye. When I’m writing, I often have to ask friends whether it’s possible that a character would see something at a certain distance or in a certain context. Sometimes there are details that I’ve been told in critiques that a character would totally be able to see, like that time the premise of my whole novel fell apart because I didn’t understand that one character would recognize another character by sight.
When I was in fifth grade, I got prescription glasses for the first time. I put them on, and suddenly I could see that the green out the window was a tree, and that the tree wasn’t just green, but light green and darker green where the leaves cast shadows. Until I put on those glasses, I didn’t have those details in my mind. I understand vision a little bit, because I have a little bit, and while I can conceptually understand what it’s like to have more, I also know that I just fundamentally don’t get it.
When I have this conversation with a sighted person, it almost always feels scripted. They ask, “So how much can you see?” I respond. And they say, “Oh wow.” Or maybe they have one or two follow-up questions (at least these conversations have gotten away from the “How many fingers am I holding up?” response). But I wonder if sighted people have trouble understanding what I can see just as much as I have trouble understanding what they can see. Can they conceptually understand what I’m saying about how much I can see, but fundamentally just don’t get it? Someone who’s sighted definitely knows the pieces of what I’m talking about—light, shadows, colors, font size, contrast—but does that really mean anything to them? What are we talking about, really?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. Honestly it’s making my head spin a little bit. But I hope that by talking about it, we can undo some of the stigma and fear surrounding blindness, and maybe we can all become more empathetic in the process. That’s why I answer this question. That’s why I answer almost any question, really.
This got a lot deeper than I originally intended, but now I’m curious. Do you think it’s possible to really, truly understand what it’s like to have a certain amount of vision, whether that’s totally blind, totally sighted, or somewhere in between? To my blind friends, how do you go about describing how much you can see to others? Are you comfortable sharing that information with others? Do you find it’s helpful? To my sighted friends, is it helpful when I describe what I can see or is it just confusing? Let’s turn this into a real conversation.