When I shyly asked her about her dark lens in her glasses and the while cane she unfolded to my surprise, she smiled and simply said: "It is all about attitude. I mean positive attitude." From that moment, I admired her.

High myope with her white cane

 

Rainy day encounter

by Amy C

I was listening to some vintage Karen Carpenter while puttering around my apartment – blind, of course! And her words just put me in a mood.

What I've got they used to call the blues:
Nothin' is really wrong;
Feelin' like I don't belong;
Walkin' around, some kind of lonely clown;
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

And that is pretty much how I feel. A storm front had cancelled my plans to go simming today. I don’t mind getting a little wet, but unexpectedly stepping into a deep puddle and filling my shoe with water and mud is not fun. Been there, done that – yuck!

The Cane

(Note: this story is based on a concept and a short story written by a woman known as ParaGirl. I have adapted the subject matter, and added a few frills. Cathy, this is in your honor and with thanks!)

by Amy Casseaux

The whole thing began with a big shot of irony, in that I saw it by accident. I was driving along through a neighbourhood and I passed by a garage sale when I saw someone handling a white cane - the kind that blind people use.
I circled the block, trying not get excited. When I came back around the cane was leaning, fully extended, against a table. I parked by the yard sign that said ESTATE SALE and got out, pretended to look at other items first before coming to the table which not only had the cane, but a couple of Braille books and a talking watch. Then I saw the label maker. Yes, it was Braille, too! I'd hit the mother lode!

The Pretenders

by Specs4ever

I glanced at Darla as we were sitting in the hotel room watching the television. She was really quite pretty, even though the thick biconcave myodiscs that she was wearing became the focal point of her face. I pushed my own identical –23D biconcave myodiscs a little closer to my face in order to see her features a little bit clearer. Darla was maybe an inch taller than my 5’6”, and she was a little bit heavier, probably about 135 lbs. to my 120 lbs. She had a much bigger bust, and her long jet black hair was tied back in a ponytail, whereas my mousy brown hair was cut short in sort of a pageboy style.

Blind Vacation

Amy is a very talented author, who writes blind stories. All of her stories are taken from a website that no longer exists. I enjoyed all her stories, although some are no vanilla. So, I hope you will like them, too. This is the second I have read and the second here. 

by Amy Casseaux

The plane thundered down the runway and I felt the nose wheel leave the ground. A moment later, the rest of the wheels left the ground and we began rotating skyward. My fantasy vacation had begun. As soon as we reached altitude, I reached into my bag and removed a cassette player. John Grisham’s latest novel was on tape and I hadn’t heard it yet. My fingers crossed the Braille label and I found the first cassette. Into the player it went.

A trip home

by Amy Casseaux

"Gwen, you really need to make it this year. You haven’t been home in so long that I’ve forgotten what you look like. Every year, you’re too busy to come visit for holidays. You haven’t been to a reunion since you moved away. Five years, Gwen!"
"Mom. I just have so much on my plate right now. I’ve got my own agency to run and things are really taking off. On top of that the home office keeps inviting me back for seminars and speaking engagements. I just don’t have time."
"As the saying goes, ‘money that she cannot spend will make no woman rich.’ Gwen, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack if you don’t slow down. You are not superwoman."
I smiled at that. If only she knew. My family was even more in the dark figuratively than I was in the literal sense. I wasn’t superwoman, I was super blind woman!

The True Life Story of a High Myope

By Tom the Hungarian

My name is Tom and I am 40 years old and I high myope who also adores women with glasses. I was born in an Eastern European country but I live in the USA now and I am an American citizen.
I started wearing glasses when I was 11 years old but I needed them before. I did not want to wear glasses in the worst way. I considered it a major catastrophe. It did not fit in with my macho self-image. My heroes in the movies, in sports, in history were certainly NOT bespectacled nerds! I noticed, of course, that I had visual problems and that my friends could see things in the distance which I couldn't. But I went into a mode of self-denial. I came up with all kinds of unrealistic explanations such as "I have a cold which may affect my eyes" of "it's just one of those things". It came to a head with a little incident at the bus stop where I was waiting together with a well-dressed lady of maybe 40.

The Blind Girl

The Blind Girl

by Bobby Laurel

It was a nice afternoon at the beginning of July. I arrived to the hotel late in the morning, checked in, had a good lunch and sat under a big umbrella with a glass of beer. My plan was to walk in the woods, eat, drink and smoke on the terrace of the small hotel and, first of all, not to think about my work. Oh yes I did take my laptop with me. But before I put it into my luggage I deleted all the files about my business. The hard disc contained some films and a lot of English stories I downloaded from Internet. I wanted to read the stories so that I made a progress in English.

The stories were rather special. I followed the advice of my teacher who said: “Fuck the classic writers and read the stories you like”. Well, I found stories I liked very much. They were about people, mostly women, who wear glasses. I found them scattered in a web discussion of guys who were obsessed with glasses. They talked about frames, lenses, fashion, and girls with glasses. I had been amazed when I had found the website, because I have always been a big fan of girls with glasses.

Giving my Nose a Break

or
It‘s All Brooke‘s Fault

By All4Eyes February 2007

"Well, Lauren, that's some black eye you've got yourself there! It looks OK on the inside, though. But I'm afraid you have a small fracture on the bridge of your nose. Naturally, it's not exactly a place were we can put a cast or anything, so what I suggest you do is don't touch your nose for a few days, apply ice periodically to keep the swelling down and come back in a week and we'll see if it's healing straight. If not, we can do plastic surgery later, if you wish. Your mother says you got this from walking into furniture-that ought to teach you to walk around without your glasses!" That was a very dumb thing for the doctor to say, because

My history as an Optic-Obsessive

By All4Eyes May 2006

Every word of this is 137% true, right down to the names. To protect the innocent, I used only first names, except for my eye doctor, who I’m sure won’t mind a free plug.

I have often wondered exactly how and when my unusual fascination with all things visual began. I suppose it could have started when I was 6 years old and my mother became blind due to Multiple Sclerosis. She could only see shadows, light and dark and this lasted for about a year and a half before she got her sight back. I think this is also when I learned to love reading, because she would ask me to help by reading things to her. “But, Mama, I can’t really read yet” I would say and she’d say “But you can read some words and the ones you don’t know you can spell and I’ll tell you what they are”. I think it made me feel important to be helping her that way. At that point in time, I was not yet concerned with myopia or eyeglasses, just with blindness, although my father wore glasses (plus lenses) and my mother had worn minus glasses before she went blind and wore them again when her sight came back. Maybe I identified with my mother a bit as well. Anyway, during the time my mother was blind and for a while afterwards I used to blind fold myself and try to walk around and do things that way. I was curious about what it was like for her and also I enjoyed “being blind” like her. I also developed a bit of a phobia about going blind myself for real. I think this may have been behind a lot of my initial reading about eyes and vision, trying to reassure myself it wouldn’t happen. I find it interesting how close fear and fascination often are.