I am so sorry. All I know to say is to let yourself grieve for awhile then carry on. Don’t let this define you. You’re more than your RP. Get with a low vision specialist. Fulfill as much as you can on a sighted bucket list. Learn to live the best life you can with your new reality. You’ll be okay.

Hey, I'm really sorry this is happening to you, I can't imagine how stressful it must be.

If you're looking for more info on RP, support, or wondering what some coping mechanism are emotionally, feel free to hop over to my sub r/MollyBurke. She is a blind youtuber who lost her vision at 14 due to RP and has a lot of great videos on navigating what steps to take from here.

I hope you have an amazing support system behind you and are able to find peace and acceptance no matter what you decide to do.

I'm sorry you're going through this!

You do have some time to prepare though and you should take advantage of it. I lost my sight quite suddenly as a teen so had to start over with absolutely everything after I had lost all my sight. It's not the sort of experience I'd recommend to anybody...

Feeling depressed, lost, angry, and isolated is perfectly valid and expected. Don't let that kill your motivation though! The more you can get started on now, the easier things will be later on once you lose more of your vision.

If you live in the USA, get in touch with your state's voc rehab agency or commission for the blind;whatever your state happens to have. If you are legally blind, then you are already eligible for services. You'll need to work on orientation and mobility, Braille, and independent living skills;doing things like cooking, cleaning, and laundry etc without sight. They can also help you with accommodations for work or higher education etc;whatever stage you happen to be at.

You're also going to have to get used to using a screen reader on your computer, smart phone, and tablet etc. Whether you have a Mac or a Windows computer, Apple or Android smart phone/tablet, you have a built in screen reader. (I can go into more detail about that in another post if you wish.) I'd highly suggest you start at least experimenting with them now. Getting your feet wet will help a bit. There are a lot of free resources these days so you have that going for you. (This was not the case in the past and it was a drag!) I can say from experience that navigating/using technology with a screen reader has a different approach entirely. Not only will you need to learn how to use a screen reader with whatever platform or platforms you use, but, you're going to have to work on actually understanding synthesized speech. for me at least, that took some getting used to.

There is a lot of great technology these days to help a blind person live more independently. You can buy things like a talking thermometer, talking thermostat, talking/braille tape measure, talking bathroom scale, talking money identifier etc. I've found an amazon echo speaker with Alexa to be very useful as well if I need to check the time, get the forecast, get a phone number or address, get a recipe, or use the timer function if I'm cooking. On the iPhone and iPad, I use Seeing AI to read my mail, find things in the kitchen cabinets, read currency, things like that. It's quite useful and I wish they had this sort of stuff when I was in high school/college!

Finally, start reading audio books!

If you already do any of these things then that's great! I just wanted to write them all down here just in case.

Good luck and keep us in the loop!

Hi there. I have a buddy who's just been through this. You probably know that RP gets different people in different ways and she was unlucky in that it happened very quickly. Anyway, no matter what happens in your situation, I can answer your question about where to begin. You can get lots of help from people and that's great but in the end the only person who is always going to be available, and always dedicated to your situation, is you. So it does come down to you and your ability to be proactive and problem solve.

In situations like this it always feels like telling you about other people's examples should help you skip past the hard stuff, but you need to keep asking yourself how you can make stuff happen, how you can solve the problems. After a while you find yourself looking back on it and cursing under your breath about all the problem solving you had to do, and it does suck, but in the long term you look back on it and realise it's okay. And that's the point at which the whole thing becomes okay. Not great, you don't have to love it, I don't love being blind, but it's the sort of suck that you can laugh about afterward and it doens't ruin your life.

I really hope that helps because it's about the best way I can think of saying it. Sorry if it comes off as a load of words.