Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
@41
I have covered this on here so many times, but being sighted doesn't mean relearning anything. If it's a problem, just close your eyes when you don't need it. It won't be a problem, but if it is, the eyes still close. Everyone treats this like it just fundamentally rewrites your life the day you get it and suddenly o my god, have to learn how sighted people do everything immediately. No. It doesn't. It gives you the choice to see, you can use that as much or as little as you want. You can play videogames and work on learning to drive and enjoy movies and all that, just generally do whatever things you want to do with vision, then go straight back to using a screen reader or reading braille or using a cane or whatever else it is you're afraid is going to be taken away as soon as you can see, and slowly work on becoming as much or as little of a sighted person as you want to be for lack of a better way to put it.
Also, irregardless of career, being sighted probably doubles your salary within the first couple years of being sighted, or even gets you a job in the first place. And this also applies very much to programmers, etc etc etc. I'm guessing you're another person in the "I've never had vision, what's the big deal" camp. But look at it this way: anything that increases choices without taking other choices away is good, and this one at least doubles the choices available to you, job, hobbies, any of that. Just, poof, doubled.
If I recall you're young. At the moment you're in an environment where a lot of the blindness difficulties aren't hitting you. Even the countries that do terrible at blindness are very good at insulating kids from the sorts of frustrations this thread is about. When you turn 18, most of those things just shut down and go "enjoy the world". It'll hit you hard then. This is especially true in the U.S., if that's where you are. In the U.S., school gives you a lot of things no questions asked, even in the bad places. You can't get braille as an adult trying to do college for example, not unless you're super lucky and go to one of the very few schools in the U.S. that can do it. Travel becomes 2-3 hours one way for most people, or you pay $50+ per day for Uber or whatever. And so on.
I remember your other thread about your parents, and I don't want to take away from that sucking, but even if they're the shittiest parents on the face of the earth, they're also free assistants. They're taking care of a lot of sighted stuff that blind people have trouble with, and replacing them as an adult is very expensive. I mean hell, just wait until you get your first paper-only bills. Or, here's a good one. You have to cash a check, your bank's app is inaccessible, and the value of the check costs less than getting Uber both ways. Or "Hi, I'm from Instacart and I replaced half your groceries because the store was out. Byeee!"
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