Before I was a year old, I had my diagnosis: Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis. It’s a cruel eye disease that kills my retinas off one photoreceptor cell at a time.
Blindness steals whatever it can and touches all that remains. My family, friendships, passions and fears are all coloured by what I cannot see, and the brutality of a progressive eye disease is that it doesn’t take all at once: it drags its victim slowly into isolated darkness.
In a world that was not made for me, I move with a deliberate kind of confidence. I start each day with my head high, but every time I knock something over and struggle to find it; apologise to a wall; walk directly through a conversation or worst of all, touch a person I’ve mistaken for an object, that confident facade cracks a little more and embarrassment takes over.
As much as I try to own it, being blind is often such an isolating experience. It can have you feeling all alone in a crowded room, struggling to identify a friendly face on the first day of school or unable to locate your friends at lunch. It has you smiling at strangers in an effort to be polite and hoping to god they smiled back. All the while, one thought plays in a loop: ‘if I could only see’.
I applied for a guide dog because I wanted a more efficient means of travel than I had with my long cane. What I didn’t know when I flew to guide dog training in the first weeks of 2024 was that I was about to meet my favourite part of life.
Her name is Beasley. She’s a little yellow Labrador who worked her whole life for the opportunity to be my guide. She has all the enthusiasm and confidence in the world, and the skills to back it up. Beasley makes my travel more efficient as I predicted, but she also does so much more.
Beasley is my company when everyone else is close enough to detect, but too far to read. She’s my ice breaker when I meet someone new. She’s the comic relief with her thunderous snoring when the tension is thick.
Being blind is hard: it’s isolating and scary and frustrating and sad, but it’s worse alone. Formally, Beasley is my eyes, but she’s also my best friend; my most trusted confidant; myself in dog form, as her puppy raiser says.
With Beas, when I get lost, when I embarrass myself in front of a room of prospective friends, when I get home from a long day of wishing I could only see, I’m not alone. And on those days where the world can’t seem to allow me to forget what my blindness stole from me, I flop into bed, still in my jeans, and stare at the ceiling, nose running and eyes wet, while the only thing it gave me curls into a little ball with her head on my chest, fuzzy ear against my cheek, snoring like a jackhammer.
This article formed part of BRAW Magazine Issue 5: Mind, Mood, Mentality. You can read more of Issue 5 here.
Featured Image Credit: Courteney Pearson