Andrew Leland

There are different degrees of blindness and different styles.

Some people have the inverse of what I've got.

They only see through their peripheral vision, with nothing in the center.

Other blind people see the world as though their glasses have been smeared with Vaseline, or their head's been wrapped several times in saran wrap, or like they're looking through a thick, broken fishbowl.

Only very few blind people see nothing at all.

Total darkness.

As I lose my sight, I experience this degeneration the way you might expect, as a loss.

In the meantime, I feel privileged to still be able to see things like sunsets or tree frogs or celebrity breakfasts on Instagram.

There's another paradox lurking around here.

If blindness is a spectrum, could it also include somebody who's not actually blind?

The paradox works the other way.

How much sight do you have to add before someone's no longer blind?

At a certain point, we do have to agree that someone's not blind, even if they don't see very well.

I do think it's important to reserve blindness for people who don't have the luxury of correcting their vision, who need assistive technology to do things like read print or walk around.

On the other hand,

Separating out blindness like this can lead people to view the blind as strange or mysterious or off-putting.

And that can lead to fear and sometimes damaging misconceptions and stereotypes, like the idea that blind people are psychic, which some people actually believe, or that they have super hearing.

or more destructively, that they can't go to a normal school or hold a normal job or travel on their own.

So the next time you see a blind person do something that you think only a sighted person should do, like making eye contact with you or watching a movie or standing at a bus stop checking their phone, remember, it might be possible to see, even if you're blind.