2017-07-18 23:28:27

I know it's easy for me to right this, but... Cultivate faith in yourself. The world will try to break this down but all you can do is realize that you are worth it, and good enough, and those emotional responses  don't understand who you really are. It's fine to make small steps towards a goal. You don't need to accomplish everything at once. Let yourself adjust to site loss. When I was a young child until like 13 or so, I had some usable vision, but now I hardly ever use my vision for anything because around that time I quickly lost a portion of my vision, and from then I can't use it for crossings and things. I had to do everything by ear... Point is, you have to give yourself the chance to adjust. If the world will let you, try to learn at your pace.

2017-07-19 06:34:58

@Shrike, depression isn't fun.
One thing I've done myself in the past though is to simply realize! I have depression and so regard my own judgements about myself with suspicion.
If  find myself saying "x is  crap because I did it" I try to stop and rationalise. After all I know I! am not a good judge  the quality of what I'm able to do, therefore why should I pay attention to myself.

After all If some rabid, man hating  ultra feminist judged something I did as crap just because I possess a Y chromosome I would say that her judgement is biased.

Same with my own.

Why for example do you assume you are "lazy" for not going to the shops when it requires concentration etc. Would you call anyone else! lazy for  doing so?

Being blind is not easy, and  some ultra harsh critic commenting on everything you do will not make the situation easier.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-19 13:28:50

@Tjt, one of the most critical problems with depression is that  it interferes with a person's logic since it is essentially irrational.

For example, a person withh depression cannot say "well someone else has bene able to do x so I will be able to do x" because having depression means that you see yourself as intrinsically worse than someone else. You would say "someone else has been able to do x but I cannot because I am so much more worthless than that other person"

Usually with depression you have to approach things rather sideways in ways that deal with said depression. Eg "I cannot do x so I will do y" or "I cannot do x now so I will do x later"

so, while the positive reinforcement is appreciated, I suspect Shrike will need to deal  with where he is now before he can take advantage of it.

For instance before trying to work on hugely new skills in a public environment, try private ones?
Hell this is where playing games and persisting with them can help, since not only does one learn new skills through games playing (it was Kodp that taught me how to use vo on ios), but also when things are really! bad, very cerebral, logic based games can help a great deal.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-19 15:58:59

this post is getting off the main topic posted by Caccio,

sorry for turning the subject about myself,  thanks a lot for the positive suggestions, and I really hope Caccio manages to conquer his fears relating his possible eyeball removal.

I do believe this website has helped me a lot over the years, especially as gaming has been a part of my life since 1980 when my mother bought me a Commodor 64.k

man how gaming has come so far since then.

2017-07-19 18:23:12 (edited by Caccio72 2017-07-19 18:43:53)

Thanks again for all the empathy, encouragement, mental support, advices, and hints!

However, it seems You guys keep missing my actual, most severe problem, my current darkest fear, and the information I seek about it.
So this time I shall really try to formulate it as accurately as possible:

The information I seek is neither about blindness itself, nor about living/getting along blind in life.
It is actually one step beyond blindness, and I fear it is far worse than it.
I fear, that although I am starting to accept, and get used to my blindness, I will never be able to do so with that state beyond it.
In fact, I doubt I will ever be able to even cope with it, at least not without losing my sanity. (or is "common sense" the correct expression?)

Me, who still has a no more functioning, but still existing eyeball, with which I can "sense" the darkness around me, and another one without an eyeball, with a plastic prothesys on its place, can clearly experience the difference, that same difference, which is so difficult for me to explain to You here.

With my still existing, no more functioning eye, I can sense darkness around me, just like if a sighted person would get blindfolded.
With my other eye, which is replaced with the plastic prothesys, I can sense nothing at all, so no darkness even.
It literarily feels as a combination of dead skin, meat, and plastic.
So I only feel something is there, but it produces, it "emits" no senses at all, that's why I compared it to a glass-eye of a puppet, and mentioned the "total puppet" state and feeling, which is the one I fear so enormously.

So, my right eye is still a "sensing", living organ, while the left one is a senseless, "dead" one, I have no visual sense with it, not even the sense of darkness, unlike with the right one.
Just like with our hands or legs, those have no visual sense, so they cannot "see", visually receive, experience our surrounding, )regardless if it is colorful, black-and white, infrared, or total darkness), the very same is the situation with my left eye.

So the thing I wish, (and also fear) to find out now is, that after the eyeball-removal surgery, will my right eye become just as lifeless as the left one, will I be unable to sense even darkness around me anymore?
Will my head remain totally visionless, meaning without ANY sense of vision, like my hands or legs are?

Edit:
The misunderstandings are probably caused by my definition of "blindness".
Namely, "blindness" for me means "seeing", being able to sense only darkness around myself, while not being capable even of that, is an even far worse situation, a far more scary alternative than blindness itself!

2017-07-19 18:34:10

Caccio wrote:

Will my head remain totally visionless, meaning without ANY sense of vision, like my hands or legs are?

Actually Caccio  this is an accurate description of what I can see through my right eye, which is the one that hand the haemorrhidge. it's a living organ, but is effectively useless, shrunken and none functional and has as much sight as my finger. After it happened I used to pretend to myself that it was just dark, I even asked the doctors to keep a patch over my eye so I could imagine that it was just dark because of the patch, but eventually I realized that I was deluding myself.

if you can see "darkness" through your current eyet might be similar to my own occurrence, that because it was an eye which was previously functional your brain is substituting a kind of phantom limb syndrome with sight, or it might be you do have some actual residual vision there.
I honestly do not know  and would not try to judge one way  or the other.


Likewise, I do not know whether you personaly will still be able to see darkness with a prosthetic eye or not, but I can say that I cannot see darkness with a living, but %100 dysfunctional one.

I hope some of this is in some way helpful to you, and again I offer my sympathy for what it is worth.

@Shrike, glad the forum and such has helped in some way. I wouldn't worry about changing direction of topics, we don't have strict rules on such things and so long as replies follow logically one to another things should be fine.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-19 18:56:18 (edited by Caccio72 2017-07-19 19:01:17)

Well yes...that's exactly what I am so scared of, that will make my worst fears come true...if you guys could only imagine, how fanatically I was protecting my only one, existing and functioning eye, how "abnormally" I kept guarding it all my life, all the time, merely to prevent this thing to ever happen to it...and it will still happen, despite all my, sometimes even paranoid precausion measures...

Anyway, thanks for the answer Dark, that figures, now I know all.

2017-07-20 05:36:33

Hi Caccio.

Again I'm really sorry this is happening. Eye surgery is always traumatic since the eyes are so sensitive,  having an actual eye removed is even more so.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)