Textick

I thought I had come to terms with being colour-blind. I discovered it quite by accident a couple of years ago. Our local paper was running a series called ‘How The Body Works,’ and on this day they were running a segment on the eye. They had a couple of Ishihara tests. I stared and stared at this mass of dots, worried that the test was broken . I said to my friend Sam, ‘Can you see a number in this?’ and she looked at me like I was being mean to her. ‘Is this a joke?’ she asked hesitantly. ‘No,’ I said. She said, ‘It’s an 8.’ I stared and stared. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s definitely an 8.’ I got up and took the test to my mum. ‘Mum, can you see a number in this?’. ‘It’s an 8,’ she said. I stared and stared. The dots began to blur. Still nothing. I wasn’t ready to give up. ‘Dad, can you see anything in this?’. He peered at it. ‘It’s a 20,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, Dad, you’re not colour-blind. You’re just dyslexic,’ I said. So the knowledge of my disability was born. I mentioned for some years after that I was colour-blind, and I kept getting the same reaction. People didn’t believe me, because it’s so rare in women. But I think my brother is colour-blind, and I think our dad was colour-blind, so I guess our mum holds the recessive gene, and voila! I’m colour-blind.

Anyway, so years went by with people not quite believing me, until Saturday night. We had a few drinks with Mike and Roger, and then were thinking of playing Uno. Roger had never played before. ‘It’s not hard unless you’re colour-blind!’ I joked. ‘I am!’ Roger said at the same time that Mike said, ‘He is!’. So I said, ‘Me too!’ and it began all over again, the disbelief and shock at a woman being colour-blind. So we decided to get the test out again, and have another crack (since I’d slowly stopped believing I was really colour-blind since I’ve never had any real problems identifying colour or mixing up colours, aside from slight confusions between olive/khaki colours looking brown to me when they’re actually more green). I’d convinced myself that I was only very, very partially colour-blind. And then the tests stood before me. ’29,’ Mike and James said without hesitation. Roger and I stared and stared. Next one. ’58,’ Mike and James say again, seconds after seeing the test. Roger and I stare and stare. ‘I can make out a…5?’ I say. The last test, we stare and stare. ‘I think it’s a 5,’ I say. Then I change my mind. ‘No, it’s a 2,’ I say. ‘Definitely a 2.’ ‘No!’ Mike wails, ‘2 is the wrong answer!! You should have stuck with 5!’. So there it was. Dead set. I’m colour-blind.

I find this whole thing a lot more distressing then I would have expected. I think because I convinced myself I wasn’t ‘seriously’ colour-blind, but I am. I still don’t quite believe it, though. I still can’t quite accept that I might see the world completely and totally differently to how most other people do. I wonder how many strange clothing or decorating choices I’ve made because of not understanding colour? I feel a bit cheated that it’s worse than I initially thought, and I feel a little foolish that I can’t see things like everyone else. I know it sounds petty, and it’s hard to explain, but it’s like suddenly feeling like you have no authority to comment on the way anything looks or appears any more. It’s like enjoying food your whole life, and then finding out that you only have two taste buds. Okay, that might be a little extreme, but it’s all just strange how strange it is. Any colour-blind women (or men) out there who, although they’ve most likely come to terms with it by now, still find being colour-blind a bit distressing? I know I’m just colour-blind, not blind, but it was just a surprise to discover my vision isn’t faultless, and that I haven’t been born ‘glitch-free’ so to speak. Does this make sense, or am I just rambling?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 at 6:47 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.