Personal rant...

I've never really talked about this, but I always wanted to stop speaking or to be blind as a kid. Saying so out loud kind of freaked my parents out.

I wear glasses now. I didn't even know I needed them as a kid. We had basic letter-reading eye exams, but I was so used to reading without my glasses, I didn't know letters could actually be read clearly from a distance, rather than people simply having memorized their shapes.

Poor vision is possibly why I didn't care much to see. Undiagnosed near-sightedness made me spend many years feeling a little out of the loop. I've been yelled at before because I didn't wave back to a family friend earlier in the day who I hadn't seen, for example.

I was used to that isolation. I always looked down when walking. I got good at feeling when people or things were around me, although I was always a little uptight and tense from the spacial awareness anxiety that followed.

I was never very social, either. So I didn't talk much. I preferred to type.

I did not identify those functions as a big part of me, and they were annoying to have since I didn't use them much. I wanted to turn them off, maybe not permanently, but I preferred the isolation of my own mind at the time over the noise and cloudiness of vision and hearing.

Now quite a bit of time has passed, and I'm noticing that even with glasses, I still feel "blind" at times. I may be seeing something clearly, but not processing the imagery well due to either fatigue or... something else. I may have cataracts. I do see halos around bright light sources with dark backdrops.

Kind of frustrating to think about, since I've been wanting to save for LASIK surgery to help deal with my vision problems once and for all... Now I may have to deal with an entirely different sort of underlying issue.

As far as how sound and speech have developed since childhood... I'm probably somewhere on the autism spectrum. I try not to think about it too much. While I'm not ashamed, the more I think about my "natural" habits and ways of observing and processing things, the more likely I am to fall into them.

It turns out, a lot of people on the autism spectrum don't hear that well. My ears work just fine, but my brain doesn't process sound in the same way as some other people. Possibly the same with vision, but I'm not an expert and do not really know.