Rachel, I don't have anything useful to contribute to how you handle your struggle.  I frankly don't understand what you're going through, which isn't the criticism it may sound like, it's simply and literally the case that I do not have such impulses that I feel are beyond my eventual control.  I will not presume to judge you, something I'm working hard on cultivating.

I did want to take a moment to say that I am incredibly impressed with the brave, vulnerable, kind and thoughtful responses this topic has brought forth.  This conversation could have gone so very wrong.  That it hasn't is a statement about the culture we have here which is surely not perfect, but there is a reason for pride and solace here, since on a lot of fora, this would have become a slag Rachel fest, with untold harm being done.  Good job everybody.

To those who are saying that they cannot empathize my condition, I can understand completely. Like I said it probably is BIID and I don't really understand the mainstream form of self amputation. That doesn't make sense to me. I know there are other ways that people can permanently maim themselves as well for a better feeling of one's self as well. It appears to be a problem with body mapping in the brain (the same thing that causes phantom limbs), although I'm not sure how it works exactly with blindness since BIID is already rare enough as it is and the blind variety is also a relatively uncommon subset.

I found only a few other people who had this condition with the blindness variety on the internet yesterday. There was a german guy on a forum who had been dealing with it for over 25 years. I can't even imagine to be honest, I have barely been able to get past 13 or so. I don't think he actually crossed the line though, but he talked about how he secretly felt like he wished he could trade places with blind people he sees. I understand that. It causes a lot of stress, I don't know why. It's like it's stupid but I just imagine myself with a cane, and not just that but fully blind as well. It's completely nonsensical. But the condition is so rare that this german forum was literally the only active forum I could find on it and the posts were extremely sparse.

To those who are saying that I shouldn't do this to myself, I agree with you guys, but the realization that I had is that even though I realize these things and I am aware of many of the problems that blind people go through because of the person I was with for 20 months (and don't get me wrong - it's not that I think that I know better or anything), these feelings aren't rational. I realized why I was scared before and I was scared less because I wanted to lose my vision but because of how others would treat me, not only because I would be blind but because I would have done so willingly. Like I stated before I would rather willingly give up what I have to someone born blind than just destroy myself, I would be willing to have the surgery to give two kids my eyes or my retinas but that's impossible, because no surgeon would willingly do that to someone. I don't understand it, but I have come to terms with the fact that this is a major part of who I am.

I don't know yet if I'm going to act on it. But if I do I know that I'm going to have to close all the gaps before I do. I can't leave my shoe laces untied and try to go running, after all.

If it helps, I've found it therapeutic to try to blindfold myself. This fact alone kind of makes me think that it's kind of like gender dysphoria or something. It takes a couple of minutes but when it sets in I'm able to actually feel kind of alright. I'm working on learning how to use a computer, and I want to move up to have contacts with opaque lenses eventually.

Perhaps the biggest problem though is that I can't be like this all the time. I think that's what compels me the most. I can't just "Fake" being blind like someone can "fake" being paralyzed, because blindness cuts off certain abilities to do things, and if I faked it, people would never be able to accept me for who I was. Maybe you guys but I think that's because this is a group of extremely understanding people. But if I did that in the sighted world they would think I was trying to take advantage of people, or even fetishizing blind people, and I KNOW it's not that. And I think that's why I have this deeply rooted urge and desire to be like that, because that's how I see myself. It makes no sense but that's how it is.

Again I really appreciate how welcoming everyone is. This was something that broke me down for literally 4 days. I woke up this morning with intense panic attacks and broke down in tears when asking for help for it. Even though I have come to accept somewhat that this is part of who I am, I realize that this is only the first step in a mountain to be able to acknowledge myself.

Rachel, you don't need to justify your feelings, not even to yourself much less us. They probably can't be justified in the rational sense anyway so trying will just cause you more stress. You want what you want and that's an end to it. It's how you manage this want that matters, not why it exists. Growing up as a teenager once or twice I considered whether I was gay and decided no I wasn't, and I believed myself to be stronger for having considered it but never did I consider I might be bi until I met a good friend for the first time in a mud. I spent a long time trying to decide if it was just sexual frustration at my lack of a partner driving this, I considered how strong it may be compared to my attraction to women and whether I was truly bi if I was more attracted to women than men. In the end I was forced to give up, after much struggle, and stop trying to label myself. I still have doubts about how much attraction I have to men, strangely while my depression is stronger I revert to feeling virtually straight which I suspect to be taking refuge in the familiar while when I'm feeling more bouyant in mood I almost feel like I could walk into a gay club and see if I could meet someone there just as easily as with a woman. Moral of the story, try to let yourself be yourself regardless of society. I'm not suggesting you start using a cane in public or anything like that but really try not to feel any kind of guilt or shame at temporarily blinding yourself around the house.

I agree with the comments about finding it difficult to find MOTAS though. One issue is as was already mentioned we can't introduce ourselves, since society traditionally has men approaching women that puts blind men at a slight disadvantage right off the bat. Not to mention all the nonsense about watching people from across the room and trying to get them to notice you, we just can't play those games. We just don't know a girl or whoever is there unless they make themselves known to us and humans naturally avoid approaching a stranger cold without reason. In theory I suppose guide dogs can help with this but everyone seems more interested in the dog than in me, and I've got this nagging concern in the back of my mind that someone might feel jealous of the bond I have with the dog seeing them as some kind of competition. Not sexual competition I hasten to add.

I'd say that Brad is right.
You may have many people on your class or at your work, but they seem only to help you, and not all of them, or less can be your real friends. I call a friend, someone who comes and stays with me for hours and we have a lot of conversation and we are open-minded to each other. So, I don't call a firnd someone who just helps you go to your desk or move from one place to another. I'd do it for everyone. Also, I'd highly recommend you all to get or to marry with a sited woman. I believe, and it may be 100% true, that two blinds find it hard to move, or spend their life together, not only in a poor country like Turky, Iran, Afghanistan or Albania, but everywhere. you will always be stuck at your house with less opportunities to go away. I'm too young to get married. I turned to 19 last month, but I'd never marry with a blind girl. My life would had been destroyed forever.

hi turtlepower17,
it is true that some things do not require safe mode. However I wanted to go into the pc malware cleaning business, which requires constantly booting into safe mode, using boot Cds e.g sardu, UBCD4win.  Whenever possible, malware cleaning should be done in safe mode, or when possible from a boot cd.  This is to deactivate the active malware  and prevent it from damaging the removal tool.  For example, combofix is an extremely powerful malware tool.  When run, it will effectively nuke at least 70-80% of malware.  However on heavily infected pcs (with hundreds or thousands of pieces of malware), the best option is to boot directly to a boot cd and scan with it.  And this requires sight or constant help from sighted people.

This was a very interesting topic to read. Rachel, I definitely don't understand what you're going through having been born blind myself. As others have said, don't make a permenant decision you may one day regret. This world is mostly designed for the sighted and you would have a harder time doing everything you take for granted today. I'm fortunate in that I live in a place where accessibility is a high societal priority but even then, I have to constantly change routes, schedules, etc to stay as productive as I can be. For example, avoid certain parts of the city after a heavy snowfall because I know they don't clear sidewalks and don't want to spend undue amounts of time lost in sub zero temperatures. The sighted do have weaknesses or "areas of difficulty", but a blind person has it so much worse. For once in my life I'd like to be able to independently shop for groceries, go to a mall, find a suite in an office building without opening half a dozen doors, see into someone else's soul through eye contact, be (initially) attracted to a woman based on looks alone, see and react to another's body language, fully understand a TV show without DVS, etc. I have never struggled with mental conundrums such as those mentioned in this topic, and I hope I don't come off as insensitive, but robbing yourself of the ability to fully experience this world we live in can't be the answer.

hi cx2,
removing malware isn't just deleting the malicious files
it's also repairing registry and OS damage caused by the infection.  I would still have to run a boot cd for malware for this reason.  Aditionally, removing the drive from the pc would be  a hassle each time.  Also, its not that easy to remove one from a laptop. Furthermore, I would still have to run combofix on the infected pc to reset the start page, windows settings etc.  Running it on another pc to scan the atached drive won't clear the registry remains

Hi.
It could be available in windows 10. With narator. Well I hope so.

hi turtlepower17,
Most antivirus boot cds run within linux,  which iliminates the possibility of a talking install.  Also, reformating and reinstalling the  operating system completely defeats the purpose of my malware business.  Anyone can reinstall windows.  My goal was to remove all malicious software  and get the pc back into a usable state.  This is not always possible of course,  however, it usually is. Not being able to run combofix is a major setback too. Combofix would be my major offensive tool against malware. If I cannot run combofix my last resort would be a bootable antivirus cd. Another reason scanning the hdd externally is a bad idea is most rootkits patch the windows kernal.  Deleting any of the patched files will result in the pc becoming unbootable. In this sinario there are two solutions.
1. find a clean copy of the patched file and replace the clean copy with the patched copy.
2. run combofix (combofix will clean the patched file)
due to the problems I will face   in this field, I cannot do this job without someone reading the screen  In severely infected pcs.
maybe in the future, ıf I have the opertunity to see, I might think about this job, but for now, I can only clean malware off friends and family member's pcs
or people who are willing to read the screen

I didn't say it was impossible. I think you're lucky, because the average sighted person wouldn't make all that effort.
Come on, we all know what most sighted people think of us. We can educate them in an employment setting, or form friendships with them, if they want to be educated, that is. Some people just don't, and we're better off without people like that in our lives, if at all possible. Which, at times, its not possible to cut people like that out, if they're our boss, for instance, and we need money, or insufferable family members who should know better but choose to keep their heads buried in the sand.
All I was trying to say is that dating a sighted person presents some challenges that I don't think exist in relationships between two blind people. Equally, there are challenges that exist in relationships between two blind people that don't exist in relationships between a blind and a sighted person. And there are also challenges that exist in relationships, period, no matter who's involved.
It's all about what each individual person feels they can handle, in other words. If I met a sighted guy who didn't care that I was blind, and treated me as an equal, and I loved him, that's great. It could happen. I certainly don't know what will come along in the future. It's just that I've dealt with a lot of condescending people, a lot of people who truly should have known better, and still treat me as though I'm 5 years old. That would never be a healthy dynamic in a relationship between two adults, and I'm not about to find out what it would be like to experience that, at least not willfully.

I can agree with that statement.
I had vision to an extent for the first twelve years of my life. Because I was on a slow dive into blindness with my eyes failing on me, I knew it would come eventually, but I didn't think about it too much to avoid undue stress.
Unfortunately, I ended up losing it in the worst possible time. When a lifetime's worth of emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse as well as chronic depression resulting from said abuse suddenly caught up with me. The problems just magnified.
These days I hate the situation I'm in, I cannot make peace with the way my life's turned out, if only because it has taken an extreme amount of suffering that I can confidently say would break most people.
I myself endure because things will probably at least emotionally get a bit better eventually, even if the reward is minimal at best and misery is mostly still there. If nothing else, it's better than giving up and letting the suffering win.

I had a relationship with a blind person before, lasting about 20 months. If he wasn't so stupid regarding girls, we'd still be together. Alas.

I really did love him and I wish he'd stop being a dumbass, but men can be so stupid, regardless of their sight or lack thereof. I'm not even really mad at him, I just want him to apologize so we could at least talk to each other again. The level of synergy and excitement I had with having him in my life was an extremely positive influence on my psyche.

I found dating a blind person to be incredibly interesting and in absolutely no way a chore at all. Seriously, I'd forget most of the time because I was far more interested in his character. However, I had to divert my attention from his blindness, although this was more because of the issue that this topic was originally made for, and caused feelings of curiosity and obsession to envelop me. I never felt fear of his blindness, I felt intense fear of my obsession, desire and interest in blindness. I never looked at his cane because it would trigger those thoughts, but after a while if I numbed my brain out from it I could look at his face. The cane thing is so intense that light metal rods can cause the same reaction, as well as certain colour schemes of white and red. Watching him fumble in his darkness was also really difficult for me, for the same reasons. We sometimes talked about it, beat around the bush, but he found out before I even did that. He told me that he thought I was reincarnated from a blind person in my past life, and he would keep saying that. I think he knew about my secret although I don't think I directly ever told him. He never seemed to mind my tendency to try to avoid certain things about his physical blindness. Maybe he didn't notice. Or maybe he did, and knew why I did it.

It was all very surreal. He seemed to understand me better than almost anyone else. I wish I could date him, but unless he completely turns around and gives me a few years to recover from his actions I don't think that will happen.

Bottom line, people who don't date blind people because they're blind are stupid and are really missing out on some great individuals. Although there are some really creepy blind guys out there, there are also some that are the sweetest little peas on the planet.