Peace deficient sight

I’m colorblind. Or to be more technical about it, I’m color deficient. This means that I have difficulty distinguishing between what I would call similar colors. I’m guessing this might not make a whole lot of sense to “normal” color vision people.

Most of the challenge arises when I have similar colors that are deep and dark as well as light in nature. So I can’t tell the difference between a dark purple and blue. They look exactly the same to me. Similarly, I have difficulty with a light pink and gray. How dark or light? Well, it depends. Even some not so dark or light colors I have difficulty distinguishing between. Especially when I have nothing to compare a color to. So you know those traffic lights that are flashing just red or yellow — if it wasn’t for a stop sign accompanying the red ones, I wouldn’t know which color it was.

This past summer we were on a trip to the Great Smokey Mountains. On our way back we stopped at a Tennessee rest stop. Tennessee has done something incredible. They have installed color blind friendly view finders. I got the opportunity to look through one. This was the first time in my life that I saw what red really looked like. It was amazing. It was bright. I had never seen anything like it before. The colors of the objects I was looking at were distinct and clear. There was no mistaking what color the various objects off in the distance were. Because of my deficiency I needed something outside of myself to assist me in seeing “normal.” I do not have the capacity on my own for “normal” vision, no matter how hard I…