Some people see the world differently
My wife, for instance.
She has what the “experts” call eye conditions—condition, being a polite term for disability or disease.
She doesn't see the world in 3D, but in 2D-ish.
People believe she's a clumsy person, she is not!
And I have a strong (even violent) reaction when people see her in the wrong way.
It is hard to live in a 3D world when you see in 2D, you idiot!
That rage was once self-directed. I know her for a long time, and I also thought, for years, that she was annoyingly clumsy. She is not. I did not know—and she did not know either—that the reason for her tridimensional inaccuracy is stereoblindness.
She figured it out by reading books.
You should know by now I dislike (most of) today's medical doctors because they treat people as machines, as customers. They don't read much these days. Most of them don't do proper research, they aren't genuinely curious about their subject of expertise either. They simply follow pre-designed recommendations issued by (pharma funded) health authorities and diagnose accordingly—if x, do y.
It is, literally, like reading a car manual and determine whether the oil needs to be replaced by checking the odometer—sometimes just by looking at the calendar.
Yeah, that's what MDs do these days. Even my former, trustworthy car mechanic checked my Corolla with more genuine interest and curiosity than the average MD looks at his patients customers.
But she is smart, and curious, and learn many things from books. So she figured it out by herself. Then, we went to the “professionals” to “confirm” it.
I am not going to mention the full list of things we found out over the years regarding my wife's seeing peculiarities. Neither I'm going to detail the many implications of having 3D blindness beyond the wrongly labelled “clumsiness”.
But I'm going to tell you about is her very special supernatural ability to see things in her head.
Sometimes we talk, and she imagines what I'm describing or referencing to, and she laughs so hard that I know that's not normal. When I look at her face and I feel like she is seeing it rather than imagining it. I believe she sees things in super high definition in her head.
I'm not sure what other people experience when they imagine things. Even though I am a visual person, when I imagine things, it is more like a blurry image with non-visual, abstract meanings “attached” to it rather than a sharp and colourful image.
With her eyes she sees in 2D, but with her mind, in 4D. Such is life, you get somewhat compensated.
She perceives the light differently, too. All those years she insisted on coming back to the Netherlands because the light here is special. Indeed, I do notice the uniqueness of the daylight in these nether lands (and there is a scientific explanation for that, something she also taught me. But I will leave that out for simplicity). But what she sees, that, is a mystery for me.
Thanks to her, I met two of my (now) favourites painters: Johannes Vermeer and Joaquín Sorolla.
She brought me to the Sorolla Museum in Madrid and, a few years later, to the Mauritshuis in Den Haag. Both, small enough museums so that you can to traverse them in two or three hours without feeling visually oversaturated.
Both, Vermeer and Sorolla, are called masters of light. Please, look up their artwork if you don't know what I'm talking about.
I can't see the world through her eyes, but by looking at her face, I believe she sees the world as Vermeer's or Sorolla's paintings.
Some days, when we are cycling together, she asks me to stop, and simply contemplates the landscape in awe. Then she describes things that I cannot see. All these years, and she hasn't lost faith in me, she still thinks I will be able to see through her eyes one day.
And that's why I hate doctors. They go around with their scholarly expertise saying my wife has some kind of blindness whilst I am the one who is blind; I witness a sunset on the beach and do not see Sorolla's paintings.
What I have done is to study my wife's gestures for years, and try to imagine what she sees. Over time, I've learnt to correlate her facial expressions with my own mental imaginarium— an extensive collection of blurry images with messy non-visual notes attached to them.
After learning to read her face, I am able to experience—to a limited extent—the aweness despite my blindness.
There are days, not many, when she looks at me and smiles in a way that correlates to soft warm morning light according to my internal imaginarium mapping. I double-check, no errors.
I don't experience joy, but shame.
It is a shameful experience because I know that I'm just a dusty broken mirror, and that the light she sees comes from her own eyes.