About these newly reposted blogs...

In terms of writing, the last four years have been some of the least productive and least creative I've known. Following graduate school, the death of my parents, my separation from my wife and subsequent move to Phoenix, (all interspersed with bouts of severe depression) it was barely in me to acknowledge to myself, much less however many blog readers happen to trip across this site, that my eyesight has been ever worsening. In the midst of those circumstances and that realization, I had pretty much abandoned Blind Adaptation. But there is more to say. More practical stuff to be sure, but also more emotional stuff. There is more about how my own blindness affects not just me, but those around me, those who care about me.

I'm also pulling the old posts out, reviewing and revising where it seems prudent, and inserting new material that I feel may have been missing.

I may as well tell you, I'm still very well adapted for the amount of vision that I've lost. The term legal blindness, in my case, refers more to the amount of visual field that I've lost than it does my visual acuity, though each continue to diminish. I have less that five percent of a normal 200 or so degree visual field (Yeah, I know, the common wisdom is 180 degrees, but we have a slight capacity to see just behind that.). Most of that usable eyesight is concentrated in a little spot just over my right central field. The rest is...well, a sort of Impressionist miasma of light, color and movement sensitivities interspersed with just plain blank spots.

There are a couple of reasons that I've mentioned that I'm well adapted. The first, frankly, is that I may not always be - physically, mentally, emotionally - and I need a peg to hang what may one day become a former brag, a lost confidence. The second reason harkens back to advice given by a psychiatrist that my old mentor John Marks, Ph.D referred me to when I'd expressed a desire to help other blind people professionally - also blind, also well adapted and successful. He was, at the time, one of those increasingly rare psychiatrists who could afford to take the time to counsel his patients, not merely prescribe. When we first spoke, I was still filled with the exuberance of my abilities; from simple things like cooking to orienteering and dead reckoning abilities that rivaled those of most of the fully sighted people I knew. I, perhaps incorrectly after considering our exchange, attributed these mainly to an ability to be calm, steady and systematic in the judgment of my environment.

The psychiatrist, as much as he valued his own abilities and expressed delight in mine, suggested that I might instill a false hope and, eventually, frustration and resentment in others who might not be able to manage as effectively as he or I - no matter the quality of their training or counseling or support. That there are, and will be, limitations has been more and more clear over time. I'd first seen this many years ago as a sort of storm that overtakes one's ability to run, to drive, to twist and turn away; a flood that swamps a rowboat. I saw it as a nearly physical thing that overran physical things and abilities, realizing as it did that much of what was being pulled down under the wheels of this thing lumbering over me was a kind of quickness, or rather, I was reaching the limits of a quickness needed to move from the potential for disaster and adaptation. Pharmacists may refer to an overdose margin, that thick or thin line in which homeostasis may - or may not - pull us out of harms way. The thinner the line, the easier it was to jump from therapeutic dose to overdose, from high risk to certain failure or injury or death.

I'd always perceived that overtaking, that narrowing margin as a strictly physical problem and, ironically as a professional counselor, seldom considered the overrunning of cognitive abilities and almost never being swamped emotionally. Well, I was. Being first, if only in the way that I care to describe myself, a cognitive scientist, and only second a counselor, I saw my ability to learn slipping away. I saw the way my shift in dependence to my ears affected my spelling and the way that I saw and conceived of words in my own head. I began to sense the extra ticks from exposure to understanding when all I could rely on was hearing.

The counselor was the last in getting a shot at assessing this mess. I could go the rest of my life - which at times felt more than a little foreshortened - without seeing the Louvre. But to not read another book with my eyes and have to settle with that devastated me. I thought - sometimes still think - that I could feel a little of my mind slip away with every compromise to an audio book that I made, while still developing the skills to deal with them more effectively. I was changing, and I didn't like it. I was losing myself and didn't know how to go back. With this loss, vitality, exuberance and wonder, to say nothing of confidence, slipped away.

So there is more to add. This isn't a cookbook or a manual, or a way to say, "Look at me! I'm a well-adjusted mother-fucker!" In fact, by now, you should be getting something distinctly different from that. Whatever you do end up obtaining here, I hope it helps you to stay safe and sane.