Look at your surroundings right now. See all the bright, neon colours covering the room? (unless you’re one of the weirdos who like everything to be in black and white). Just for a second, imagine the room you’re in right now, was just a little bit dimmer or a little bit darker. Imagine the entire world - from bright fields of flowers, to the dense forest of the Amazon - was just an ocean of brown, grey and black. Yeah. Sucks right? Well that's my day-to-day life.
You see, as one of the many colour blind people of the world, my world is quite dull-looking and frankly a little sad. However, I am not the only one, nor am I a part of a small group of people with a rare condition. In fact, I am 1 of 300 million people across the world who have to see this dark, dull version of the world.
That's right there are a lot of us, but you might be asking yourself: That sounds horrible? And why haven’t I heard about this before? And why is the author of this blog so good looking? (We’ll get to that later.) Well, well, well you’ve come to the right place, as this blog is going to educate you on the life of a colour blind person.
What is colour blindness?
Colour vision deficiency, more commonly known as colour blindness, is a mostly genetic condition that affects 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, with the most common version being red-green colour blind (like me, yay!). The reason why this occurs is because the colour receptors in your eyes may be broken, causing them to be less responsive to certain light, making some colours hard to see or causing confusion between certain colours.
Now this, like many other conditions, can range in severity from not even noticing you have the condition or only being able to see one colour. Yeah, one colour! You thought what I saw sucks, try only seeing one colour for the rest of your life.
As you can imagine this can lead to sometimes humorous and unique situations (those are stories for other times though).
When did I find out?
I found out I was colour blind after doing an eye test at around age 6 or 7. However, what led my family to test me, is quite a funny story. At school I did struggle a bit to identify colours, which nowadays is not a problem in high school, but in primary school, knowing your colours is kind of essential. I think my parents just thought I was a little bit stupid, but the final straw was when my parents bought a picture.
I remember looking at the painting of 2 hands holding a bunch of flowers, and I kept commenting on how the picture looked strange. My mom ended up doing a surprise “test” asking me what each colour was. When I got each colour wrong, my slightly over concerned mother took me to a proper test.
Did you know that in the UK it is not mandatory to do a colour blind test, unless otherwise specified. That means that many people out there in the world are colour blind and have no idea! I am thankful that my parents caught it early, otherwise I would have grown up thinking I was stupid.
It still shocks me how a condition so common isn’t tested at an early age. All the people who are affected by colour blindness and don’t even know it. They must have lived their entire lives thinking something is wrong with them… anyway on to less depressing stuff.
Getting my glasses
I think early on we knew that glasses were available to me that could help with my condition, but until very recently I didn’t buy them. The main reasons for this is: A) they are seriously expensive, most of them come from America, and shipping experimental technology over an ocean is costly. B) I just didn’t think I needed them. You have to realise that I’ve seen everything the way I do from the start of my life, so I figured, if I made it this far I could survive the rest of my life. It's only when I decided to pick this project that I bought a pair. Wow.
A part of me thought that the glasses wouldn’t work. It does stress on the website that 1 out of 5 people won’t see a difference, and knowing my luck I would be one of those 1 in 5. To my immense surprise I wasn’t! For the first time I saw colour!... in a garden center. Still, though I never realised how bright the world actually was, it was pretty cool. I was wearing a red T-shirt at the time and it finally dawned on me why my parents told me to change so often.
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