I didn’t set out to write a book.
I set out to make sense of what was happening to me.
The idea for a book came later, after I realised that what I was losing wasn’t only sight.
I was losing certainty.
Identity.
All those quiet assumptions about how my life would unfold.
People talk about vision loss as a medical condition, and of course it is. But it’s also a psychological event. An emotional one. A practical one. A relational one. It rearranges things, inside and out.
The things I had relied on without thinking, the ease of movement, the independence that comes with that, the confidence of recognising a friend across the street, or sometimes even standing right beside me, began to shift and disappear.
It is a kind of unravelling that reaches into the heart of identity.
What does it mean to be me?
Who am I?
What remains when the familiar roles I’ve built my life around, the painter, the teacher, the chef, the driver, begin to fall away?
All those things we quietly attach our value and self-worth to.
I wrote Blindfullness because I couldn’t find the kind of book I needed myself.
Not a heroic story.
Not a tragedy.
Not a technical manual.
Just something honest.
Something that could say:
This is disorienting.
This is frustrating.
This is frightening as all hell, by far the scariest show in town.
And sometimes it is also darkly funny.
Most importantly, it is survivable.
Mindfulness has been part of my life for close to thirty years. When my sight began to go, meditation didn’t fix anything, but it helped me stay.
Stay with the fear.
Stay with the grief.
Stay with the loss.
Long enough to steady myself and realise that even as many of my perceived identities were falling away, I was still here.
This book is not about being brave.
It is about being real.
I think of Blindfullness as a kind of travel guide from the land of the sighted to the country of the blind, the kind of guide I was searching for in the beginning. Something that could help me understand what it might mean to cross that border.
Viktor Frankl wrote that while we cannot always choose our circumstances, we can choose our response.
Blindfullness is my attempt to choose a response rooted in presence, curiosity, and compassion, even when the path ahead feels uncertain.
If this work helps someone losing vision feel less alone, or helps someone sighted understand the experience more deeply, then it has done its job.
Because in the end, what I needed most was not solutions, but understanding, and the feeling that I wasn’t alone.