Being blind isn't the end.
My fiancee's favorite thing to do is walk around her neighborhood, she's completely blind, no vision at all.
Her favorite thing about New York was all the green space they had, and all the parks.
She fell in love with me because I gave her an Axe on our first date, something she thought nobody would ever do. Because why would you give a blind person such a dangerous item?
Because being blind doesn't make you a useless, dependent person. It just makes you blind.

I was about 20 when an eye doctor told me it looked like I had macular degeneration, but that he thought that was weird since it's primarily an age-related condition.

15 years later we're still trying to figure out what it is. I can't drive anymore. It doesn't matter how big the TV is, I can't read anything on it. I've had to relearn how to use a computer with a screen reader, which has had additional challenges as a web developer.

I have a family, finished college, then went back and finished again. It's not like it's been the easiest thing in the world, and it still provides challenges. I gave up snowboarding, but I can still skateboard. I don't do multiplayer FPS games anymore, but loads of other games are still fun and are increasingly more accessible.

Life went on. Life's been beautiful, it's just different is all.

> I think about how much I haven't seen, I think about how much I haven't done.

I was worried about that too. I made what I call my Visual Bucket List. It was my opportunity to save for the trips I wanted to take, finally see Foo Fighters live (*absolutely* amazing, btw), and a few other things before it's more frustrating than fun to do those things. But because this impairment isn't an overnight thing, I get to do those things while learning new ways to enjoy them.

you still see with MD ... I have juvenile equivalent That was pretty aggressive

this is what you do: you cry and feel sorry for yourself for a week. Then get over it

life goes on.. you choose how to derive value... when I had my vision, I played baseball competitively, now I can’t see the ball so I surf, get just as much value

I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa when I was 9, but ever since I first went to the opthamologist when I was 3 my parents were sure I had it. My diagnosis changed literally nothing about my life.

It wasn't until a few years ago that my condition started to have any real impact. I mean, sure I was already legally blind due to field loss, but if you saw me in the street back then you'd be none the wiser. Now I get frustrated and melancholic about what I can no longer do - I used to love playing video games, painting miniatures and tabletop warming, and reading - but I've never thought "RIP, my life is over, I may as well just quit". It's just an annoyance that forces you to change what you do and how you do it.

Think of it this way: you have a car, something happens and your car gets tashed and needs repairs or replacing, now you can't drive places. In such a situation you don't despair that your life is over because you can't get around on your own any more. You start walking more, or taking public transport, or have friends or colleagues give you a lift, or use taxis or ridesharing services. Having disability isn't the end of the world, you just do things differently.

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I go on because there's too many people out there who love me, and depend on me being around. I can't let them down.

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Being blind isn't easy, but suicide is the coward's way out, and I will not allow myself to succumb to that. There's too many people out there who need my love and support, and I have every intention of being there for them.

Husband has stargardt's, which is a type of juvenile macular degeneration. So does his sister. They've made sure to do/see plenty as it's a slow progression. Even as it's gotten further, they do/see plenty. One thing is that having blindness (visual impairment) as part of your life doesn't change who you are. It changes your circumstances. As a person you'll adapt to whatever the way it presents itself. Love. For any major life changes therapy is recommended.

I've been blind for 6 years, and have made very little progress into adaptation during this time, because I was already a person of narrow yet deep interests with sight, and blindness affected both the breadth and depth of my interests negatively, so my biggest struggle is to find anything interesting to do, without which I have absolutely no motivation to push forward.

I think I've gone through all the possible phases that I could all the way up to where I am now: the denial phase, in which I thought that I was being misdiagnosed and that my vision would come back somehow; the positive phase, in which I thought I would adapt fully and quickly and resume my life without any trouble; the negative phase, when I realized that having an independent life wouldn't be the walk in the park that it was before my sight was gone and just wanted to die; and now I find myself in the apathetic / egotistical phase, where I don't give a shit about responsibilities anymore and just want time to pass until my natural or accidental death eventually comes.

As for passing time I do exactly the same thing I used to do before losing my sight: coding, but without sight it's no longer as rewarding as it was before, because one thing that I used to be proud of was my independence and versatility in the world of software development, and I've lost a great deal of both. Ironically I've been focusing a lot more into graphical software now than I used to before going blind, and this is a result of MacOS, Xcode, and iOS focusing more into user-facing apps and being more accessible than the Linux environment in which I used to do kernel, compiler, and network software development. A consequence of this is that I'm much more dependent on the sighted to tell me whether the graphics and user interfaces that I'm designing programmatically look exactly the way I intend, something that's only possible because I live with my retired mother who is almost always home. Hopefully some day I'll find a way to use the Linux console comfortably blind and will resume writing the kind of software that I love, but until then I'll keep trying to have fun writing user-facing apps.

I'm a process-oriented person, as opposed to goal-oriented, that is, I value the process of climbing the mountain more than I value the goal of reaching the summit. In normal circumstances I find that living for the moment provides better gratification than living for the outcome, but as I found out this philosophy of life has also left me vulnerable to disability in a way that I didn't predict due to ruining the experience of life for me, and at 38 I think I'm too old to change something that has become part of the foundation of my personality.

So, to answer your question, as far as my experience is concerned, you just learn to go on naturally, not because life improves in any meaningful way but rather because you get used to shit being the new normal. Some people will tell you that their lives actually improved after going blind, but that's not my experience, because I was happy before losing my sight, and at the moment I believe that I will never be able to enjoy anything even remotely close to the quality of life that I had.

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Like juvenile macular degeneration, as in stargardts? Or you will have MD later on?

Blindness is all I know. There is no loss to me personally but give yourself time to greeve. It is a loss for you but after the greeving period, the best thing you can do for yourself is go through training. I recommend contacting the National Federation of the Blind. They have resources for people who recently lost their sight and training centers that will help you learn how to live independently as a blind person. Don't let this keep you down. This is not the end but a new begining.