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Let me start off by saying, for those who need to hear it, that if any of the following sounds like I believe in spiritual mystic psychic blindness powers, I don't. It's just hard to talk about this properly because most people never need to, so we never invented good words for it.
We hack around our blindness in different ways, there almost seems to be a taxonomy to it even, though that's a different discussion. Mine is by modeling everything. If something can't be modeled at all, it's not necessarily causing fear, but it's at least causing unease. A dog can be modeled: you know the general shape, you know that a given dog stays the same shape, you know certain things about it like if you give it food it will eat the food or if you get all aggressive it might bite you. Both in the aspect of the pure physical world and in the aspect of the higher order mental/philosophical/whatever world, you can concretely say and predict useful things about a dog. This is orders of magnitude more true about inanimate, fixed objects. I never had full vision, but as I lost what I had, this modeling became linked to sight: I still "see" the world, in that I process information and my surroundings visually, based off these models of what should be there. It links into everything: I can close my physical eyes, but if I close my mental eyes I can't function. How I chop stuff in the kitchen links up to this, for instance. I never actually had enough vision to know what chopping stuff really looked like, but I had enough that the visual cortex was online and could just generally learn to do things a visual cortex does, then somewhere along the way that plus whatever else turned into this thing where I always have and function off a 3-dimensional map of my surroundings to some level of accuracy. Then, because that was what I was already doing, that general "model the thing" approach went out and said "this kind of works for figuring out what people are feeling without seeing them", and though I don't use visual metaphors for that, it's the same idea: there's a model of them and their mental state in my head, a reflection of what they might/should be feeling/reacting to what I'm saying, that's perpetually re calibrating to physical reality in order to make up for the lack. Repeat ad infinitum over the years for basically everything.
This isn't unique to me. I have other blind friends who are like this to some extent or another, and that day I confessed that I realized I was "seeing" the tv even though it was off and also I shouldn't be able to do that anymore, and "seeing" people in the dark, I expected to get "huh that's weird" but mostly just got "yeah, me too". SO maybe unique to lebers? I dunno. But nonetheless.
But what's the point? Well, I don't like flying insects: you don't know what they are. I don't worry about earthquakes because of the earthquake--though that part is really scary too--but because after, there's literally no rule that can be applied to the environment. Now go out on a nature walk sometime, you never, ever know what's going to touch you when. Grab a branch and run your hand along it, likewise. Take a plant and wave it around, it's not going to make the same sound. It's a big blank. If you gave me a shapeshifting blob and a shrub, perceptually and through models, they're actually mostly the same. Sort of, holes in the world.
Effectively, lots and lots of other things are perceptually the same and I deal with them, but couple it with a bad childhood experience of being dragged through a bunch of plants for a couple hours when they're all taller than you and it's thick enough that the adults were taking turns clearing a path, and you're not really old enough to understand, and they won't let you go back--there you go. Standard phobia. Then add a dose of "let's give our child exposure therapy" while I was, likewise, not really old enough to understand, and certainly not old enough that it was voluntary, yeah, great plan. Exposure therapy can work, but not when it's involuntary, I promise.
It's not "this is going to kill me fuck fuck fuck" fear, though. I don't think about plants and go "wow that's dangerous". it's just very, very unsettling sensations, plus the fact that they definitely change unpredictably over time, and then add a bad experience and my parents' great ideas on how to "help", and you end at nature walks or whatever being this really apprehensive thing I will never do voluntarily, and forget yardwork. If this sounds like autism, I know: it's on my "am I autistic or just blind" list.
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