Queen Riddles was a fun-loving monarch who liked riddles and jokes. She had spent most of her life working out answers to riddles, so there were few who could trick her. All it took was a little
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I have wondered what it would be like to see the way everyone else does. Not because I don't see. I do. I know what my mother looks like. I know the faces of my friends. I know my own face. I know the colors of the sky and the shape of the buildings around me.
But my vision has always come with rules. I don't have depth perception, so stairs require my full attention. I have no vision in my right eye and no peripheral vision, so someone can walk up beside me and I may not know they're there until they're close. Things in the distance become clearer only when I get closer. Sometimes I need larger print. Sometimes I need help.
And sometimes I don't ask for it.
I've spent my whole life learning how to take care of myself, and somewhere along the way, independence became more than a skill. It became something I felt I had to prove.
So I learned. I learned to slow down. I learned to memorize. I learned to double-check. I learned to figure things out before anyone could decide I couldn't. I even learned to hide my cane for a while because I was afraid of what people would think when they saw it.
Then one morning, I woke up and all the rules were gone.
I opened my eyes. And everything was clear.
I sat completely still. The room hadn't changed, but somehow I had. I could see across the room without trying. I could see everything around me at once. Nothing disappeared at the edges. I didn't have to think about which eye was doing what.
I laughed. Then I cried. I had imagined this before, but imagination had never prepared me for how much there would be to see.
I walked to the mirror. I already knew my face. I wasn't meeting myself for the first time. But I could look at myself without thinking about distance or clarity or whether I was standing in the right place. I just looked.
For once, seeing required no effort.
I left my room. At the stairs, I stopped. Habit. Then I realized I didn't have to look down. I could see every step.
I walked down. One. Two. Three. No hesitation. No fear that my foot might land somewhere I hadn't expected.
I reached the bottom and stood there for a moment, almost disappointed that something so ordinary could feel so extraordinary.
I kept walking. Across campus, someone approached me from the side. Normally, I might not notice them until they were close enough for me to recognize them. This time, I saw them coming. I didn't jump. I didn't turn my head. I just watched them walk toward me.
I wanted to cry again. Not because I was sad. Because I had never realized how much energy I spent preparing for things other people never had to think about.
I read signs from farther away. I noticed people before they spoke to me. I saw details I normally had to get close to. The world hadn't suddenly become more beautiful. I had simply been given access to more of it.
And I loved it.
I loved it so much that, for a while, I wondered if this was what my life was supposed to have been.
That afternoon, I sat in the driver's seat of a car. I had never been able to drive. I put my hands on the steering wheel and looked down the road.
I could go wherever I wanted. No waiting for someone else. No figuring out how I would get there. No wondering whether a place would be too difficult to navigate. Just me.
For the first time, I understood why people talked about driving like it was freedom.
I thought: Maybe this is the life I was supposed to have.
Then I saw my cane sitting beside me. I picked it up.
I remembered being afraid to use it. Not because it made me less capable. Because I was afraid someone would look at me and decide what I couldn't do.
I remembered all the times I had struggled a little longer because I didn't want to be a burden. All the times I had figured something out alone because asking felt harder than adapting.
I thought about how strange it was that I had spent so much time proving I could do things independently that I had sometimes forgotten that accepting help could be part of independence too.
I looked at the cane in my hands. Maybe it had never been a symbol of what I couldn't do. Maybe it was a symbol of everything I had learned to do anyway.
The next morning, I woke up in my own room. My vision was back to normal.
My normal.
For a moment, I was heartbroken. I missed the clarity. I missed seeing someone before they reached me. I missed walking down stairs without thinking. I missed the idea that I could simply get into a car and go.
I still wanted those things. That didn't disappear just because I had spent a day without them.
For a little while, I lay there, wishing I could go back. I wondered if I would ever stop imagining what my life might look like with different eyes.
Then I thought about everything I had learned to do with the eyes I had. Not because I had never struggled. Not because I had never wished things were different. But because, even when things were difficult, I had still found ways forward.
I had spent my whole life wondering what it would be like to trade places with someone who could see the way I wished I could. Now I knew.
And the strange thing was, I hadn't discovered that I wanted their life. I had discovered how much of mine I had built with my own hands.
I had built patience. I had built independence. I had built ways to keep going when something took longer than it should. I had built a life in a world that wasn't always designed with me in mind.
I reached for my cane. This time, I didn't think about who might see me using it. I didn't wonder whether I looked different. I didn't apologize for needing something that helped me move safely through the world.
I stood at the top of the stairs. I looked down. Then I took my time.
One step. Then another.
I still wished I could see more. I probably always would.
But wanting a different view didn't mean I wanted a different life.
I wasn't becoming normal. I wasn't becoming someone else. I was becoming more comfortable being me.
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