On Colorblindness

I found out I was colorblind in seventh grade. My science teacher had charged me with explaining perception to the class, and while researching the retina’s cone cells I stumbled upon the Ishihara test. You may have seen it. It’s a series of circles, each comprised of colored dots arranged to form a number in one hue against a background of another, something easily legible to anyone with normal color vision. I printed it out. I wrote TAKE THE TEST! in neat letters at the top of the posterboard. I followed my own instructions.

My dad and my brother are colorblind, so I had been the Resident Normal Eyes for as long as I could remember. I had sorted all of our embroidery threads by color, advised my dad on his choice of tie, told him go ahead, park there, it’s not red. My family was as mystified as I was.

Still, things started to make sense. The time I painted everything in my room — the walls, the bookshelf, the dresser and desk — my favorite shade of pale blue, only to have a friend say, in what I assumed at the time was sarcasm, “I love the purple!” When I failed the same simple geography test three times in a row because I couldn’t differentiate the color-coded borders in the study guide. How my mom, long-divorced from my dad, once happened to visit the house and notice the aforementioned thread collection, which she promptly resorted correctly, muttering darkly under her breath. In preschool, I colored in the sky with a purple crayon. My teachers thought I was creative.

These are all anecdotes now, packaged stories filed neatly in my identity where I can retrieve them for social credit or amusement. But there’s one part of this story that I don’t talk about: the doubt that crept in, long after everyone learned about and accepted my condition. How long had I been accidentally lying to everyone, claiming an authority I had no right to? What’s more, I’d been taught that I had certain characteristics, that they were mine — that my wit, or my curiosity, or my love of reading were all things that originated in me and emanated out into the world like beacons or billboards or whatever. But suddenly all of these stable qualities seemed contingent upon recognition from other people. And it turned out other people were often wrong. How much was going unnoticed, or misunderstood? Could we ever really know ourselves at all?

It scared me that I had apparently spent my entire thirteen years as the living embodiment of Locke’s inverted spectrum argument, seeing the world in a way systematically and fundamentally different from almost everyone I spoke to. For all I knew, my other senses were different, too. Maybe the delight I’d always taken in intuiting the nuances of language was totally unfounded. Words, I realized, didn’t refer to anything except other words. They couldn’t touch subjective reality, couldn’t ever attach themselves to What It’s Like To Experience Things, except in ways that were arbitrary and often superficial.

When I thought of all the colors I’d never really been able to see, I couldn’t help but think of everything else in the world my senses and language were unequipped to detect or describe. There were thousands of emotions, for example, that weren’t in my vocabulary. How many words did the average person even know, anyway? Fifty thousand? Five hundred thousand? Was that to be the asymptote of what I’d be able to communicate and share and explain in my lifetime? My confidence in consensual reality started to slip. Colorblindness had proved to be the perfect crucible for all of my unresolved existential angst.

Of course, I couldn’t articulate any of this in those terms at the time. I tried not to think about it. Mostly, it wasn’t a struggle. Within a week or two, I was endorsed; colorblindness was part of my private and public persona. News of the Girl With Fucked-Up Eyes traveled fast in middle school. Testing my vision quickly became a game among my friends, a kind of Victorian sideshow spectacle. “What color is that guy’s backpack?” they’d ask. “What about that bird?” Sometimes I was wrong, naturally. But frequently enough I got it right, either because I’d developed a heuristic like If It Looks Blue-Ish And A Dude Is Wearing It, It’s Probably Blue And Not Purple, or because I just got lucky — after all, there are only about a dozen standard colors, and I could usually see well enough to narrow it down to two or three. When I won the game, my friends clapped and cheered. But we all knew that I’d also, in a sense, failed. After all, I was supposed to be colorblind. I was supposed to lose. If I got it right, there was no surprise, no intrigue. I was boring.

My successes rattled me. I began to obsess not just over what my new identity meant, but about what it would mean if I were mistaken. I couldn’t help being skeptical: I had made the initial discovery so hastily, with a brief online test and no formal exam. What if it turned out I wasn’t colorblind after all, that I had just jumped to conclusions and accidentally deceived everyone? I knew that colorblindness was far less common in women than in men, with just one-half of one percent affected. And what’s more, a lot of people seemed to misunderstand the condition (disorder? deficiency?) altogether, rejecting my explanations with “Women can’t be colorblind” or “So you see everything in black-and-white?” How, I wondered, could I possibly take this back? I would have to change schools. I would have to become a monk, retreating to misty mountaintops to live a life of isolated penance. But maybe women weren’t allowed to be monks. In that case I would have to work behind the scenes in my own backyard to stage an elaborately orchestrated Faith Healing to miraculously restore my color vision in front of a teary-eyed audience of friends and family and perfect strangers, whose only impression of me would be of a Girl Who’s Pretty Normal and Can See Colors Just Like the Rest of Us. I could write books about my recovery. I might even be on television. I would be special! But isn’t that how I got myself into this mess in the first place?

The thing is, it wouldn’t have been the first time I had lied about a problem in order to feel unique. My conscience gnawed at me. In third grade, I faked a gastrointestinal disorder that allowed me to periodically leave the classroom in a dramatic huff to go hide in a bathroom stall, making occasional gagging or whimpering noises if anyone should happen to walk in. That one I somehow managed to phase out by the fourth or fifth grade, when it was no longer useful, and even now, I’m not sure what my parents think — perhaps just a long-lived bug that eventually cleared itself up.

I faked sick a lot up until the end of high school. I even wrote a book called Faking It detailing my best tried-and-true methods for convincing people you’re not well enough to complete the task at hand. It was organized by severity of disorder, each accompanied by a list of appropriate symptoms, how to counterfeit each one, and suggestions of circumstances under which it might be appropriate to employ various tactics, including warnings of how many times a given illness could be feigned before people were likely to get suspicious, and cautions against faking anything terminal. The goal was to be pampered, not hospitalized.

I enjoyed being taken care of, and being the object of concern, but I also enjoyed the visceral thrill of manipulating others. Schoolchildren taunt each other with I know something you don’t know for a reason. I held a secret, and one that gave me enormous power over my caretakers.

I fantasized about mental disorders. I befriended a schizophrenic boy my age and spent every weekend talking to him until 3am on AOL Instant Messenger, trying to figure out his secret so that I could co-opt it for my own purposes. I remember lying awake as a small child until my father came upstairs from the living room to his bedroom, at which point I would wait ten or fifteen minutes and then begin howling, complaining of night terrors, a sleep disorder I must have encountered in one of the books in my father’s extensive library. In retrospect, my love of reading probably largely stemmed from the need to occupy myself while waiting for the opportune moment to launch into theatrics.

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that colorblindness was exactly the kind of thing thirteen-year-old me would have eagerly adopted. It was just exotic enough to garner the attention of everyone in the social hierarchy, and even though it was on its surface a disability, it was benign enough to seem interesting but not frightening or repulsive. Colorblindness. Yes. I’m sure I would have seized upon it earlier if the thought had only occurred to me, and perhaps if having normal vision in my own home didn’t give me a different but equally appealing kind of power, that of the one-eyed man in the country of the blind. Precisely because it was so appealing, I was wary of my own self-diagnosis. All of my prior affectations were intentional choices with short-lived consequences — but I knew that I was so starved for recognition that I might very well have deceived even myself into thinking I was different. I was too clever for my own good.

Eventually, I took a set of formal optometry tests. I am officially deuteranomalous, and my budding nihilism, fortunately, turned out to be pretty much a product of being in middle school, being a girl in middle school, being a girl in middle school who read too many books, etc. But while its subject changed, the internal mistrust I faced never really went away. Almost a decade later, I can’t help feeling like all of my personal traits are flukes at best, downright bullshit at worst. What is it about me, really, that makes me funny, or kind, or creative? And if there’s nothing — if these are just habits over which I have no control, and whose existence is largely dependent on other people’s opinions — then how do I know they won’t vanish at any moment?

I can’t take credit for anything; even my greatest achievements seem like accidents. I’m plagued by the constant suspicion that I’ve tricked anyone who shows any sign of approving of me. It’s somehow easier for me to think that my friends are poor judges of character than to accept that I might actually be worth their time, easier to think that my professors are stupid than that I might be smart. It’s as if I’ve somehow overcompensated for my childhood histrionics: if anything does have the potential to make me well-loved, to garner the attention and approval I so desperately desire, I immediately reject it.

A few years ago, I discovered there’s actually a name for this kind of thinking. It’s called impostor syndrome. All the symptoms seem to line up. But I’m afraid to make any conclusions. It’s exactly the kind of disorder I would love to have.