The World Through My Eyes

I’m so colorblind I can’t buy bananas with confidence.

I can buy them. I just can’t tell you if they’re ready.

That distinction matters more than people think.

Most people experience colorblindness as a trivia question. A harmless little condition where somebody mixes up green and brown once in awhile and everybody laughs for three seconds before moving on.

Living with it feels different.

It feels like existing slightly outside of visual consensus.

Recipes say things like “golden brown” with astonishing confidence.

Chicken is apparently no longer pink at some point. Bananas become yellow. Avocados reveal themselves to people who have apparently been granted access to secret information.

Meanwhile I’m standing in Safeway holding produce under three different lights like I’m authenticating stolen diamonds.

LEDs are worse.

Tiny little status indicators shifting from red to orange to green as though every human being interprets those as distinct and obvious.

Without context, I often can’t tell what color they are at all.

People will say: “You’ll know when it changes.”

No, actually, I won’t.

That sentence fascinates me a little because it reveals how many assumptions are embedded into ordinary life.

Most people never have to think about how much of the modern world runs on color interpretation.

Dashboard lights. Battery indicators. Charging states. Medication labels. Traffic systems. Food safety.

After COVID damaged part of my sense of smell, cooking became even stranger.

Meat stopped being instinct and became instrumentation.

I own thermometers now the way mechanics own torque wrenches.

I cook by timing. By sound. By texture.

I know onions are ready because the sound changes when the water leaves them. I know soup is thickening by how the spoon moves through it.

The strange thing is I don’t experience any of this as sad.

Mostly it has made me aware of how fragile “obvious” really is.

People move through the world assuming perception is universal.

It isn’t.

Sometimes I think that realization shaped more of my career than I understood at the time.

If you spend enough years living just outside consensus, you stop assuming systems are naturally legible.

You start asking whether they were ever designed to be.