I've lived with vision loss my entire life because of a stroke I had before I was born. My kind of visual impairment is called a cortical one, which just means it's due to a brain problem and not an actual eye one. I have tons of my friends who wear contacts or glasses (I'm a die hard glasses snob by the way) and it's common for me to joke with my friends about how blind I am.
I have 20/70 vision which is best explained by saying that I'm in that category where I'm not legally blind (20/200) but yet nowhere near perfect (20/20) vision. It's a struggle sometimes, sure, but as the French say "C'est la vie" or "Such is life". If you make friends with a visually impaired person or choose to date one, be prepared for these things:
We will laugh at ourselves, and that's okay
I can't count how many times in a day I either think or say something that pokes fun at my lack of good vision. My close friends now just laugh with me (which is totally okay and welcome). It can be something as simple as a friend offhandedly saying to me, "Look at this!" at something far out of my visual range and my response being all like, "What? Dude I can't really see anything remember?" I'm not putting myself down when I say things like that, rather I'm accepting and embracing something that makes me who I am.
If we say we can't see it, chances are we can't
Going off of the last point, whether I'm joking (which I mostly am) when I say I can't see something or am 100 percent serious saying it chances are that I'm telling the truth. Often things are too far for me to see even with my glasses so I either don't see them or if they're close I might miss them if I wasn't paying attention. I don't drive because of that reason: I can't see far off and sometimes even up close I tend to get distracted and space out visually which, not surprisingly, is a bad quality in a driver.
Stairs are the bane of our existence
And they're everywhere: in our houses, at our schools, in every place we visit. It's inevitable and we hate it. For us, it's not so much climbing the stairs itself but rather not being able to see where they start or end. I know I rely a good bit on rails to guide me down stairs and I always have. Some of my favorite words to hear are, "There aren't any stairs". To me that is a big sigh of relief.
We are not here to be pitied, so if you stay with us because you feel bad, leave
This goes for friends as well as our significant others. We want to be seen as normal people and we want to be accepted and liked or loved just like anyone. So if you go into a friendship or relationship with one of us because you feel bad that we might not have as many friends as someone else or if you feel we aren't with someone romantically because we "aren't wanted" you might have to step back and revaluate your own reason for getting close to us because most of us won't put up with pity.
