Back when I was getting ready to undertake my indoctrination into the public school system, I remember sitting with my mom and reading a simple book about animals, shapes and colors. It was your typical preschooler’s book with large friendly text describing the simple pictures in the book. Everything was going great until we got to the dreaded purple elephant. I worked myself through the explanation, stumbling over each syllable until I finally got the whole sentence out of my mouth, “This is an elephant, the elephant is purple.” In my little 4-year-old brain I sat back and thought for minute about what that meant. Then I looked at the picture of the elephant and thought some more. After a great deal of deep contemplation I took my eyes from the book, looked at mother, and told her “This book is wrong, that elephant isn’t purple; it’s blue.”
It’s been 17 years since then. Seventeen years I’ve been living in a world of less-than-brilliant colors. Seventeen years of not knowing what matching is, and not in the stereotypical way that males don’t understand matching, but really not knowing if the tie I’m wearing is painful to look at. Seventeen years of not being able to read pie-graphs, multiple scatter plots, maps with color coded regions, text on certain backgrounds, or those infuriating Ishihara texts. In this time, I have had to explain to innumerable friends and acquaintances what exactly it means to be colorblind and how it affects my life. The short answer is that it has no major effect on my life, only a lot of small annoyances that really start to wear down your tolerance level for people who are only being curious. In the interest of saving my fellow color blind compatriots from having their brains jump from their skulls after answering the same question once more, I’ve compiled a short list of answers to the most common questions I get.
What color is this? The answer is shut your face. This is by far the most common question I get anytime someone finds out I’m color blind. It’s even worse when I’m in a group of people because for some reason everyone thinks they found something that would be more hilarious for me not to see. The last thing I want to do is play some twisted version of “I Spy” that I can’t win, so please don’t ask.
How do you know what color this is? This one is usually asked after I get a question right during the “What color is this?” game. I don’t live in a world of black and white. I am still capable of processing most of the visible light spectrum, just with a little less distinction between the areas. So what I’ve done with my limited vision is accept a few things as irrefutable truths. This means the sky is the standard for blue, grass for green, fire trucks for red, and so on. After years of practice I’ve gotten OK at comparing things to those standards, but when things get put together the whole game changes.
What color do you see? How should I know!? I’m color blind, remember? I can’t see what you see, so how am I supposed to tell you what I see in terms of what you see when I have no idea what the world looks like to you? This usually leads to the philosophical debate about how nobody sees the same thing and we’re living in a contrived reality. Interesting thought, but we can measure the way peoples’ minds interpret light pretty well, and there is a specific way most people literally see the world, so don’t think you’re smart for coming up with that theory.
