We Have To Chose To See

Living Happy Round-up

Oct 03, 2022

person holding eyeglasses — Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash

The bandages on my face keep everything dark, so dark, and there is nothing to try to figure out no doubles of things. No blurs of movement. It is all just darkness. But I know I’m home again. This is my space.

The world smells of pot roast gravy and cigarettes, my mother’s Chanel No. 5, and my sister’s coconut hair.

My sister puts me on the floor. The carpet bristles against my knees and palms. Fingers sink in. Home. This has to be home. Again. I know this rug. I move forward across it.

“Will she be okay?” my father’s voice squeaks so far above me.

Mom says, “It’s not like she could see before. Anything is better than that.”

The shag rug is warm beneath the palms of my hands.

There are noises of cars on the highway in the distance. My mother’s heels click across the linoleum kitchen floor.

Then I find it. The couch, tweedy and rough; it’s a straight wall up, beyond what I can reach. I crawl behind it. It is my favorite route around the living room even when there are no patches, no stickiness on my face. My space.

When I was born, they thought I was blind, but I didn’t know that then. I just knew what I was, that when I reached out to things there were four of them, sometimes eight. Not seeing seemed normal to my one-year-old self just as having no depth perception at all feels normal to my forty-something-year-old self.

I didn’t know I was missing anything at all until I started to see again, when the blurs became faces, when the world didn’t become clearer, but wasn’t quite such a smelly, blobby mess.

When they took the bandages off my eyes, the light was so blinding, the world so big and overwhelming, that I refused to open my eyes.

“Come on, baby. Open them for Mommy,” my mother coaxed as I sat on her lap.

And I did.

My family cried and I blinked fast and hard trying to adjust to a world where objects were more than a smell and a touch, a feeling. I still close my eyes a lot when I talk. Maybe that’s because sometimes I’m still adjusting?

When they took the bandages off my eyes, the world was so different than my world. White walls were scuffed. Socks had designs on them. Shoelaces were rainbows. The light, all that light, hurt my brain, stabbed into my temples.

“Carrie, look. Look! You can see,” my sister cooed, squatting in front of me and my mom in the doctor’s office. “You can see.”

I closed my eyes, reached out and felt the silk of her hair, grabbed it in my fingers.

When they took the bandages off my eyes, I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to see the world with all its detail and brightness, the tears in my sister’s eyes, the doctor’s beard that had something stuck in it, the strange colors of the floor. But I did. I opened them again.

My reality isn’t the reality of others. Because of my early blindness and how my brain developed, I don’t see 3D movies. Those 3-D puzzles? Don’t work for me. And it’s hard for me to know exactly where my body is in space. I bump into doorways. I walk into coffee tables. People think I’m klutzy, but it’s just that I don’t exactly know where my body is.

No. That’s wrong.

I know where my body is. I feel it. But I don’t know where it is in relation to the world.

When my husband and I used to run trails in Acadia National Park, he’d go first so I could watch the placement of his feet and put my own there.

For each obstruction he’d yell and point, “Root. Ditch. Rock.” That way I’d know where there were stable surfaces, where it was safe for me to touch the ground.

We live in a world where there are so many unstable surfaces—humanitarian crises, dictators, abuse, neglect, poverty—and so many times we choose to not see them for what they are. We choose to not see.

We all have to figure out our space in relationship to the world. Some of us just are a bit more obvious about it. And some of us choose not to do that at all. But our space is about more than our bodies crawling across carpets, sitting in laps, running on trails. Our space is about what we’ve inherited, where we’re allowed to ‘be,’ where we’re welcomed and excluded, and where others are or aren’t. Our space is something that we claim, but also something others need to be able to claim, too.

We can’t be blind to that. We can’t choose to only see our own version of the world.

There is a great quote by Audre Lorde, where she wrote, “Your silence will not protect you.”

Our blindness won’t protect us either. We have to do everything we can to see the details of our world and our spaces within it, and where other people don’t have space? Well, then we have to help them claim it. That’s what vision is. It’s about a lot more than our eyes.

I think that’s part of why I write. When I write stories I get to control that space, claim it, for myself and for my characters. How do you claim your sight? Your story? That’s the big question, right? And I think there’s a pretty simple first step.

We have to choose to see.