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I first noticed that I was losing my vision when I was a teenager, and I've been losing it

ever since just by degrees.

Andrew Leland wrote a book called The Country of the Blind.

Around 20 years ago, when he was in high school, he started to lose his sight.

You know, every two years or so, when I go back to my retinal specialist, they say,

yep, you've lost another chunk.

Now, Andrew is legally blind. He sees

5% of what a fully cited person would see. He compares it to look into a keyhole. The eye disease

that I have, which is called retinitis pigmentosa, is extremely gradual. Sometime in the next, you know, however many years, five years,

10 years, you know, that 5% will go down to 1% or a fraction of a percent.

One almost takes for granted how much one uses one's vision.

And when sight is lost, you have to learn how to do things differently. You have to confront

the emotional part of that first. There's this, there's this feeling of loss and of, really,

of grief. You have to sort of mourn the loss of vision because it is something that's so

central to how you are oriented in the world. And then you have to sort of mourn the loss of vision because it is something that's so central to how you are oriented in the world.

And then you have to, the sort of second stage, I would say, is more practical.

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