Colors & Quotes: The Light-Hearted Side

I decided after a more difficult post, I would share some of the funny and interesting things from my experience with achromatopsia.

The fun way that people find out that I have a visual impairment is when they find out I’m completely colorblind. Yes, I say fun. I mentioned before that I am not as disappointed about my lack of color vision as those who’ve had it would be. I don’t really know what I’m missing, and it’s actually very interesting to most people I meet. The discovery is usually followed by questions. Here are the most common ones:

1) How do you match your clothes? Seriously, that is the most common question. It’s not that hard. A little bit of memory, some basic principles, and help from a friend can get you a long way. : )

2) You don’t see any colors at all? Nope. Well, actually on rare occasions I think I have seen bright red and bright yellow. Red is usually in print, like in a magazine, or on a fabric. Yellow is usually a car or, my favorite, yellow leaves in fall. I love the yellow trees. They’re the only color that truly glows in my world. But again, this is extremely rare (a handful of times a year), and I’m not even sure if I’m really seeing color. I’m actually pretty good at guessing colors by shades (unless they’re weird shades of that color).

3) So, do you see all in black and white? Yes, probably, but I don’t think in terms of color (hey! Look at that grey car, and those grey flowers, and that grey cat… ). I always tell people about the time I was watching Schindler’s List with my mom. She said, “It’s so interesting that the whole movie is in black and white except that girl’s coat.” I responded, “It’s in black and white!?” So I imagine if you suddenly saw what I see, it would be about like that.

4) How did your parents figure out you were colorblind? Well, when you’re a small child, you’re expected to learn colors. Obviously, I was a little behind on that learning curve. But I have a brother just over one year younger than me, so his quick color mastery pushed me to learn. And by learn I mean memorize… everything. I had no idea what was meant by these color names. I just knew I had to remember them for every item in my small world. And I did pretty well. In fact, I fooled my mother (unintentionally, of course, although she was confused why I wouldn’t even look at the objects sometimes). She didn’t realize what was really going on until we visited a family friend’s house, and their kids had one of the same children’s books we owned but in different colors (who does that?). I confidently told her all the wrong colors from memory. So they took me in to test my color vision (they had already learned that I was visually impaired when I was six months old).

All of this does not mean that colors are meaningless to me. In fact, I enjoy them greatly in a poetic sense. I may understand more than average, and in my own way, how people attach different meanings to different types of colors. I actually frequently ask what colors things are just out of curiosity, and I love to hear how people describe colors. I also love to read, so some of the descriptive uses of color are beautiful to me, even if I’ve never seen them. And I’m always baffled and amused by two people with color vision arguing over what color something is.

This part of achromatopsia is the cause of most of the jokes with family and friends when they forget. Everyone forgets that I can’t see color. Sometimes it makes them laugh, if we’re close enough for them to know that something so slight wouldn’t offend me. Sometimes it makes them feel bad, which it shouldn’t. I used to tell people not to worry, since even my mom forgets. Then one day I forgot! I was hanging out with some friends and got up to get a popsicle. On the way, one of my friends called after me, “Hey, will you get me a blue one?” I got to the freezer and looked in, thinking let’s see.. blue, blue… wait a minute! Yeah, we got a pretty good laugh out of that one. : )

Here’s some other fun stories and quotes (some color-vision related, and some not):

Me – “Where’d you get that ice cream?”

Friend – “What ice cream?”

Me – “THAT ice cream.”

Friend – “That’s rice.” And of course we both laughed. : ) (In my defense, it was sticky white rice still in it’s scooped out form.)

Speaking of ice cream, my family likes to remember the time I happily covered my ice cream and cake in ice cream chocolate syrup. It was a light colored cake, so I thought it was all ice cream.

Then there was the time I mistook whipped butter at a buffet for some other substance you would eat in larger quantities (whipped cream for something or some sort of mousse maybe?)

Then there was the time I brought back a box of dog biscuits for us to eat instead of crackers (I’m not sure why they would be in the same location).

[Wow, I guess a lot of these are food related.]

 “You’re blind. You should be able to see better than me!” – my sister. She was actually joking about my supposed ability to see better in the dark, and ended up saying something ridiculously illogical. I don’t think it’s actually true that I see better in the dark, but friends and family have lots of good-natured jokes about me being a bat or some other darkness-loving creature.

“I’m such a musical liar!” I said this when helping a friend practice for an audition. I was trying to play the piano accompaniament, but couldn’t see the music. I pretended to be reading it (without realizing that’s what I was doing) until I reached the end of my memorization and stopped.

One year at our family’s 4^th of July celebration, my sister and I played a little joke on the rest of them when we enjoyed our annual home fireworks. We have lots of little children in my extended family (on my mom’s side), so I was able to subtly slip in my own exclamations. My sister sat next to me, feeding me the correct colors, and I would exclaim: “Oooo, nice red one. Oh, I like the blue….” Then when they caught on and figured out what we were up to, I started saying the wrong colors to make it look like it her fault. : D You probably had to be there to get the full effect, but the idea is that there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun with the limitations life throws our way.

In fact, I think that’s the wider lesson I could offer from this post. It’s a common mistake to believe that taking everything with deadly seriousness is respect. In fact, the people who have the most solid understanding of the common suffering of humanity are most able to properly make light of their own difficulties. Sure it’s possible to use humor as a means to draw attention to ourselves or to deflect pain, but it’s also a way to remind ourselves that ours is not the worst suffering and to enhance the lives of those around us with a hearty enjoyment of life. A good balance of deep reflection and light enjoyment of life's ironies seems like the right way to me.