Blinded by the bionic.

“I didn’t know you wore glasses?”

“I’m legally blind.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but not for much longer.”

“What laser?”

“No. bionic eyes!”

I’m sweating. In the unairconditioned sports hall of the faith-based College. That faces the ocean. With the killer view. Mid-week. Pickleball.

She’s asking when it’s happening. Between dinking drills. A player I admire. With the accent. And the drool-worthy-double-handed-back-spin-drop.

You see, I’ve never been able to see.

Literally.

Every now and then, metaphorically.

I was born with seriously defective eyes.

Eyes that no matter how hard they tried, could never see more than a smattering of smears and blended blurs. Past the tip of my out of focus nose.

From my first memories I wore glasses. Funded by the National Health. The kind unfortunate kids in the movies wear. The kind kids from not-rich-families in London wear. The kind kids with band-aids-holding them-together-when-broken, get teased for, wear.

I coped. As well as I could. But living in a really big world when you are as small as me, without sight, left me feeling scared, vulnerable. Lost.

And sometimes. Terror.

I’ll never forget being primary-school age, told to jump into a 25-meter pool almost 4 meters deep, without my 1cm thick coke-bottle-lensed glasses.

Without being able to see. Or swim.

That kind of fear doesn’t leave you easily. Its sticky. Like gum sunbaking on a sidewalk. Indefinitely stuck to the sole of your favourite new shoes.

And then it happened.

My life changed. Overnight. In my 14th year.

The day I got contact lenses.

The day my disability. Disappeared.

I spent the next 36 years convincing myself and the rest of the world there was nothing wrong with me. Or my sight.

Until February this year, where one of the globe’s greatest eye surgeons gave me bionic eyes.

And the gift of 20/20 vision.

My life changed. In the blink of an eye.

Again.

But not in all the ways I anticipated.

Whilst my physical vision improved immediately, it took months for my brain to adjust. Working overtime to sync with and process a world it had never before experienced. Or seen.

My eyes didn’t hurt. My brain was in constant pain.

But what hurt most was the grief of gaining sight at the expense of losing a world of blindness. That left me fragile and fallible. But familiar and founded.

It got me thinking. About the unexpected changes. The unobvious losses. The unpredictable gains.

How sometimes our limitations become our foundations. Our weaknesses, wisdom. Our blindness, a new way of seeing.

And how healing isn't always about gaining something. Sometimes it's about grieving what we had to give up. Acquiesce.

In order to become whole.

Even.

When what we lost, was badly broken.

Because here's what my surgeon could never prepare me for. When he fixed my eyes, I knew I’d lose my blindness. But I didn’t know my blindness was where I learned to see.

Not the world. But through it.

My brain finally caught up. And on.

My bionic eyes work perfectly now. Sometimes I close them anyway. 

Just.

To remember what it felt like. To not sink but swim. Trusting in what I sensed was always there.

Even when I couldn’t see.

H2BH 038/365