Walk with me for a moment

I have an eye impairment that renders me legally blind. With corrective eye wear my vision is 20/100. People often would ask "what does the world look like to you?". It is impossible to explain because I'm missing things that are obvious to someone with better eyesight, it was never a question I could properly answer, and I think I never gave the things I went through proper justice as a result. The easiest way I can explain this to you is that when you get an eye test, and they stick you a ways away from that eye chat with the big 'E' at the top, well... That's all I can see, with glasses or without them. Every time they'd ask all I could say was 'E'.

Growing up as a child you're not really aware that something is different about you, you're far too concerned watching cartoons. It doesn't matter to you that you sit directly below the TV looking up at it in awe, but understand that's not because of the technological feats of television blowing your child mind, you just can't see the damn thing from anywhere else in the room. But you don't think about it like that as a kid, but adults are keen to give your mother shit for how close your child sits to the TV, as if it matters so long as she's enjoying spongebob.

A common theme throughout my life seems to be that no one really knows I can't see well until I inconvenience them in some way. A potential date night is cancelled because they learn you take public transportation and can't pick them up. The cashier looks at you funny as you squint at a menu placed behind them that may as well be chalk lines instead of letters, not offering any help mind you, just gawking. The common theme of "is she stupid" runs along with this, with my grade school hesitating on whether I would be allowed to take our state's standardized testing since not being able to see well means I must not be good at school subjects. In my professional life I've had people accuse me of being illiterate because I dare look too closely at someone's fucked up handwriting on a paper.

You can tell there's a lot of anger in me about this I'm sure, and to be honest there is. It isn't fixable, it won't get better, it won't go away. In so many ways it has dictated how I will live my life without any further choices or options. To be ruled by this, to have it decide what job you take because the one you want and is a perfect fit isn't on the bus line, is fucking maddening. This is my life, this is not up to my vision to decide damnit. But so many times it was, so often it was to make sure I had money, or health insurance, and so many times it cost me my mental health by placing me in horrible working conditions.

I don't want you to feel sorry, people deal with far worse day to day then I do. Work is over for me now, there will be no more workplace induced trauma for me, and for the most part life's grey clouds have started to part because of that. Still what I wouldn't give sometimes for the chance to blast down the highway in the Nissan 240sx I would constantly have a watchlist of, before they were even popular.

There's no particular way i want to end this, I just want someone to read it and listen to my story.

Later Gator