A day in the life of a legally blind person

Johanna woke up. She looked around: she saw the room as a mix of blurry objects, whose contour she could not grasp. Colors were somehow visible. Some showed up washed out, while others just showed up as unintelligible mud.

She looked at her smartphone and scrolled through her feed on Facebook. If she kept the phone pretty close, she still could read something even without the glasses. However, if she dared to keep it at a distance at which a normal human eye would read the letters, the image would become blurry and unreadable.

She opened her PC and started working on her projects for the university. In order to do that, she had to zoom in until the letters became really big. It wasn't the ideal way an eye was supposed to work, but at least she could fulfill her duties and do the work she needed to do. Then she discovered there were some mistakes she overlooked when she proofread earlier. Somehow, her eye did not see them even if she was pretty good with writing and knew the spelling rules by heart. Annoyed she corrected her mistakes thinking if this disease had not been present in her life, she would have achieved more and finished faster her work, projects and would be way farther in life than she was now. Most of the time, she zoomed in and could see what she needed to see, but this approach is not doable in every situation. A thought crossed her mind, asking insistently and annoyingly: "Why me?" What a beautiful, rhetorical question most of us can relate to in a situation that we feel like a victim in and feel stuck and don't know how to get out of it.

"Hey, want to play that cool new game together in multiplayer mode?" a message of a friend of hers popped up in messenger. She politely declined thinking it was pointless as her eyes would not keep up with those of her friend.

When your eyes don't work the way they should, you learn to rely on your other senses to the point that your smell, touch, hearing, and taste are enhanced. Now, being legally blind does not mean you can't do anything at all and constantly need help from other people. Tasks can still be completed but at a slower pace. Jobs can still be done, but it also depends on how bad the vision loss is. And no, there's no need for help in every situation. For Johanna, for instance, some colors were slightly unrecognizable, seeing at a distance at which normal people would see would be indeed impossible and glasses would not correct much. Sometimes known people would pass by her and she would not recognize them as they were just a blur made up of some unintelligible colors and shapes. Seeing a bus or tram in the distance would be very hard. Driving a car or piloting a plane would be out of the question for her. She could handle a lot of everyday situations very well and got used to living like this. However, she could not help sometimes but wish she had a better vision so she could be more independent and not feel left out of social situations. Because no matter how inventive you would get and find solutions to issues this medical condition would present, sometimes you just want to be like everyone and use your sight at its fullest or nearly fullest capacity possible. Being like everybody else is not always a bad thing. However, in the end, our circumstances and excuses won't matter, and focusing on something we can't control does not help either. The only things that help in such a situation to reach your goals would be to find your why for your goal and the desire to succeed must be greater than your suffering caused by life's circumstances, but also an unmovable decision to keep fighting until you reach your goal. It would be nice if we all had access to an ideal life, but we all have a contract with the universe with some preset life conditions. Every unwanted experience can come as a burden or as a lesson that makes us stronger and leaves us appreciating life even more for the miracle that it is. Happiness does not mean we have in our life everything we want. Happiness means we have the capacity to appreciate and see life's beauty despite its imperfections and flaws and accepting that everything happens for a reason. We need to learn to trust the universe.

Peace means accepting everything as it is and no more resistance to what the universe brings us. Peace means accepting that things happened the way they did and you can't change the past, nor do you agonize about the future and what it brings. Peace means being in the moment. Peace is something that we give to ourselves. Peace means choosing to learn to see the beauty and light in you despite your imperfections. Peace means being one with the universe.

Seeing is believing. If your vision capacity is twenty percent, what are you supposed to believe in? Sometimes the only way through life is believing in the unseen and having faith through dark times.