**Trigger for some maybe**
I felt I needed to put this into words, a sadness in my heart today that has brought me to tears off and on. I’m not invulnerable or invincible, and days like today really hit home to me how very different I am from most of the human race…
As I’ve stated in previous posts, I can’t see faces, I can’t recognize photographs and unless I’m close enough to get more information, can’t tell people apart from one another in a crowd.
Today I found an envelope of pictures of my girls…I know they are because that’s what’s written on the envelope and on the backs of the photos…I want to see those images so badly…I want to see what my girls liked like at the ages that are posted on those photos…and there is nothing that’s gonna help me see it. I can close my eyes and remember their colors, the sounds of their voices, their giggles, but that doesn’t change the hole that looms at the fact I don’t know what they looked like…I don’t know what they look like now…not the way everyone else sees them.
Even writing this I can’t stop the tears…its a deep sadness that isn’t really depression, but something else. Its not necessarily a negative emotion, but its not a comfortable one either. I don’t really have good words to describe it other than this ache deep in my chest and stomach for something that is entirely unobtainable. Almost like the ache one feels after losing a loved one…all you want is to hear their voice, their laughter, feel their hug just one more time, but its gone forever…only for me, I’ve never had it, and never will.
I can’t say that my ability to process how I see and interact with the world is typical of those who suffer a similar condition, because no one else has really spoken of it and as far as I know, I am unique in that I see people in colors without physical details such as glasses, clothes they wear and such…I don’t even know what skin color someone has unless its told to me…
All I want to do is see my girls…truly see them as my husband sees them, my mother and father see them…
I tell my girls every time I see them and speak to them that they are beautiful, because I know they are even without seeing them because I can see their colors. But what will my girls ever think if they discover I can’t SEE them? Will they feel I’ve lied to them all these years? Will they understand? They don’t even know I don’t see the world normally, they simply think I’m a little “wacky” and for them that’s cool.
I don’t have a family photo album…
I don’t have pictures of myself and my husband, or my family together, or anything like that. I have nothing physical of my family in my home at all…People who don’t know me call me cold and uncaring because I don’t have photographs of my kids up on the walls everywhere. They tell me it shows “lack of love” and proves I don’t care about my kids…and on days like this, those words echo viciously inside me.
I do care. If I care anymore I think I would burst from it! I don’t have photos on the walls because I don’t think I could take the insanity it would bring from want of knowing what that image is. My brain simply cannot comprehend a photograph. Its simply splatters of color that make no sense to me. I used to both love and hate it when my parents took out the photo albums and have us flip through. I’d ask every single time “who’s that” and “what are we/they doing?” and my parents would reply “we’ve told you a thousand time!” laughing and explain again, until I was 12 years old…then they stopped. I stopped looking at them too. I couldn’t bring myself to explain in words I didn’t have that I couldn’t see the photos. I’d tried when I was young, but was called a liar.
I suffered extreme separation anxiety as a child, and started to have the same when my girls would leave my sights or would go to parties with loads of other kids…I’d “lose” them in the masses, even if it was only for a second, and the panic that would strike was incredibly real and intense! So while I devised a way to keep track of them, and stay sane while keeping them safe, it didn’t feel fair to them. I looked like a crazy over-protective mom. So I simply stopped going to the events–my migraines thanked me for that as well–and do my best to avoid large crowds period…even with my husband I get these panic attacks when I lose him in a crowd…
Unless you can’t see, you really couldn’t understand fully the extent of the ache, the pain, of not knowing what a photograph holds. I can’t “see” my children though as a blind person could…I can’t run my fingers over their faces, to “see” them with my fingers, so in this, I’m truly without any way of knowing what they look like except those beautiful colors.
I really felt I needed to write this, and writing it has helped to ease the sadness. I’ve put away the envelopes and hopefully its another six months before I “find” them again.
Thank you for taking the time to let me share this with you.
In Love and Light,
Tricia
Tricia's Search 