07/13/2023
When he was in high school, Andrew Leland was told that he had retinitis pigmentosa, a rare disease affecting about 100,000 people in the U.S., and that he would be completely blind by middle age. “I spent my teen-age years mostly in denial: my blindness seemed distant, like fatherhood, or death,” he writes. “But in my 30s the disease caught up with me.” In 2020, he heard about a residential training school called the Colorado Center for the Blind, which is staffed almost entirely by blind people; students live there for several months, wearing eye-covering shades and learning to navigate the world without seeing it. The school takes a radical approach to cultivating blind independence. Students use power saws in a woodshop, take white-water-rafting trips, and go skiing. To graduate, they have to produce professional documents and cook a meal for 60 people. The most notorious test is the “independent drop”: a student is driven in circles, dropped off at a mystery location in Denver, and tasked with making his way back to the center. Read about Leland’s experience of learning to live without sight: http://nyer.cm/BibJTbb
#}