Growing Up Colour Blind

This is the first in a series of three guest posts that Tony Holden has kindly agreed to write for Same Difference on colour blindness. Tony blogs at Cynical Chatter From The Underworld. He also runs the UK Disabled Bloggers group blog. Thanks to Tony.

I’m one of approximately, very approximately, 16% of males who are ‘red/green’ colour blind, though I have problems with other colours. There are colour blind females, but they are very rare. I’m not going to go into the details of colour blindness in this post. I’ll leave that till I’ve described life with the condition.

I will never forget the first time I looked at one of those Ishihara tests. I was about seven years old, at school, and it was one of those days when the nit nurse came in, you got your jabs, the sugar lump for polio, and this time an eye test including one for colour blindness, though that wasn’t explained. Those circles with the coloured blobs in them were to have a huge impact on my life.

The first one was easy. I could do it.

The second one was a lot harder. I could see what I thought was a 2, or maybe an 8, but I couldn’t make out the second number at all. I felt like a failure. I got one more and that was it.

Everyone else seemed to have got them all. I wondered why I hadn’t and I wondered what it meant, but no one told me. I just had to struggle with colours, especially in art, or other classes where colour was an issue, especially browns, geography could be hell. I would be constantly asked by my class mates why I could tell different colours apart. How was I to know? No one had ever explained it to me. It got to the stage that I would be the butt of so many jokes. “Don’t ask Tony, he says he can’t see the colours, but he can tell the grass is green,” “Tony what colour is that car?” “Tony, what colour is the traffic light on?” School could be so much fun. I just don’t know how I managed to get through it without bursting my ribcage from laughing so hard, not.

Colour blindness is a pig of a condition. I didn’t know I had it. I just knew that in some circumstances some colours were hard to recognise, some colours just didn’t register and some colours looked completely different to what others said they were. You don’t have to be different on the outside to be the constant target of snide comments. You just have to be different. Thankfully, as time went by, I became big enough that when I obviously lost my temper people would give it a rest.

Finally I got an explanation of sorts. We had another test and I got the same results. By now I was in secondary school and the person testing me explained that I was red/green colour blind, which meant that I might confuse red and green, that was it. Of course, because I was held back after my test everyone wanted to know what happened. I made the mistake of repeating what I was told. The questions started again, “Do you only see in black and white?” “What colour is this?” “What colour is that?” “Can you see the green thing over there?” “Can you see the red thing over there?”

Trying to explain what I could see was a waste of time. If you can see colours perfectly how can you understand imperfect colour vision? How can you understand that the difference between a huge patch of colour and a small speck is massive? How can you explain that it is also to do with shade, tone and surrounding colours, when you don’t understand that yourself?

My family were as bad. My father had been colour blind as well, but he wasn’t as bad as me. He died before I was finally told in secondary school so wasn’t really able to help. It was left to my sister to ask the same questions about colours as I got constantly at school, and both she and my mother seemed to think that making fun of it would help me. That led to a couple of major blow-ups that finally got the message across.

Despite everything else I still hadn’t felt the full impact of being colour blind. I still didn’t understand enough to realise what would be coming and I had no concept of just how much of a limiting factor it could be in a person’s life. I’ll cover some of that in my next post.