The age-old question: If you had to choose, would you rather be deaf or blind?

As a child, I would sometimes close my eyes and stumble around the house, arms outstretched, trying to understand what it felt like to be blind. Other times, during a movie or parade, I would cover my ears tight, trying to not hear anything so I might feel the way a deaf person would. I was never very successful in my attempts to re-create a world without light or music. While fantasizing, I would trip over a misplaced toy and open my eyes in surprise, or else some obnoxious noise would eek through my hands, which were hardly soundproof. As a child, my curiosity was merely an query of empathy. Even so, I often wondered, if I had to choose, whether I would rather lose sight or sound.

As I grew up, my appreciation and comprehension of both senses increased. I began to love dancing and learned to express myself through song. I decided to be a painter and I immersed myself with newfound awe in the world of colors. With my love of the arts, my curiosity of silence and darkness returned in a very different form. I realized for the first time that losing either sense would no longer mean simply missing out on their joys, like hearing about an exotic delicacy but never getting to taste it. Music and color had become part of me. Losing either sense would be like losing part of myself.

Shortly after discovering a natural talent with the brush and learning to portray what I pictured in my heart, I started to notice dark spots in my vision. I had heard before of a degenerative eye disease that started as small, dark spots, like little clouds, that grew until the eyes of the unfortunate were completely dark, and I lived in a horror that cannot possibly be imagined. I told no one and lived alone with my fear. The last thing I wanted was pity, and I was well aware that the disease I had apparently contracted was irreversible. I saw no point in confiding. The hardest part was that the little blobs were always right in front of me. No matter where I went or what I did, they remained. The only way to hide from or ignore them was to close my eyes, which I only did when the desperate desire for the clouds to disappear for just one moment overwhelmed my desire to see. They continued to grow. Each new spot that appeared in my eyes was like a tiny void, a place where light should be, but was swallowed instead by this foreboding nothingness, this thing of shadows and darkness.

My first reaction was bitterness. Why, after preparing me to paint, would God take away the one sense that would allow me to fulfill that dream? My second reaction, however, was a feeling I cannot fully describe, one of gentle chiding and peace. As I felt my anger wash away, I swallowed my initial thoughts and reminded myself that there would be a reason for the pain, as there had always been. I was still scared, but with that comfort, I pressed on. Though at night I cried myself to sleep, during the day I kept my eyes open for as long as I could, drinking in the sunshine that spilled over the edges of the clouds and lingering over patches of weeds that were suddenly beautiful to me. When I finally sought help, I was told to my joy that the spots were actually quite common—only temporary things called "floaters” that would spread no farther and eventually cease to bother me.  

Shortly after that experience, when I had returned to the normal duties and concerns of a teenager, I remembered the innocent question of my childhood; if I had to be one or the other, would I rather go deaf or blind? Recalling my recent scare, I was certain at first of my answer and thought myself quite childish for ever hesitating. I wanted sight. A few nights later, as I danced barefoot in puddles to the music of thunder and rain, I wasn’t so sure.

The world that we see has three different aspects—color, texture, and dimension. Color is the mixture of pigment, shadow and light that makes texture and dimension especially pleasing. This is the only aspect of our tangible, concrete world that would actually be lost to the blind, with only dreams left to tantalize. But even though colorwould be lost, the world we live in would still be assessable through touch and is reborn through texture and sound. Dimension (a combination of size, shape, and distance) and texture would still exist, but would be richer than before. The world of the blind is just as interesting as the world of color, just in a different way. 

Sound, on the other hand, is one-sided. Sound cannot be seen, tasted or smelled–it can only be heard. People who are deaf sometimes like to feel the vibrations that are made by loud sounds, but those vibrations are merely another texture and become part of touch. Sound, once lost, is lost forever, and cannot be found again through any other sense. 

If I had no option but to choose between eternal night and unbroken silence, I would gladly exchange my view of the world to keep the music, and I would not look back. Going ‘blind’, I cultivated an appreciation for my eyes because I was losing them, but discovered a much deeper love for sound, because it is a greater part of me than sight.  Occasionally, I still sit on the porch swing and close my eyes, feeling the breeze brush my skin and listening to the crickets, trying to experience the world through eyes that cannot see, for though I am acquainted with their emotions, the worlds of the blind and the deaf are still mysteries to me.