I registered my first domain name back in 1995. Had I known then what I knew now, I could have been a millionaire many times over by buying up domain names – back then you could buy just about any name you wanted. Over the years I’ve purchased many domain names, each attached to an idea for a site I wanted to build, or a Podcast I wanted to produce. It usually goes like this – late at night I get an idea for a site and I run to check to see if a suitable and affordable domain exists, and if a good name was available, I bought it. Sometimes I built a site around the domain name, many times I didn’t.
About a month ago, the idea for this site came to me (late at night, naturally) – I wanted to start a site where I would share essays related to my experiences with the loss of my vision over the past 18 months. The idea firmly implanted in my brain, I went to the computer and typed “losingmyvision.com” into a domain name registrar, and bingo, it was available. The next morning I started building the site and writing my first essay, and a few days later I launched the site.
I’ve been completely surprised by the positive feedback and traffic I’ve gotten for the few articles I’ve posted since I launched in mid-August of 2021. In that short time, I’ve gotten a couple of thousand visitors and lots of very positive feedback. Buoyed by the reaction, I thought about what I might be able to do with the site beyond just writing personal essays. In thinking about it, I decided I wanted to expand the site to be a general resource for people who have been through or are dealing with vision loss, as well as for those who support them. I decided to start adding reviews, tips, and tricks, as well as other resources that would be valuable to the wider vision loss community.
The more I thought about what I wanted to do with this site, the more I was dissatisfied with the name “Losing My Vision”. It’s not a bad name for the site, in fact, I think it’s a darn good name, but it seemed so heavy and so locked to my current experience of being in the middle of a profound drop in vision, where I have gone from having 20/25 vision to my current 20/400. I wanted to have a site name that was more of a long-term moniker, more reflective of who I am – a bit cheeky, a bit serious, and when I saw that Kindablind.com was available, I grabbed it and relaunched the site under the new domain and name.
From what I’ve learned, the term those of us with significant vision loss use to describe ourselves can be a source of much internal debate. Do you use the term Blind? Legally Blind? Low Vision? Visually Disabled? Do you say your eyes are bad? Technically I am legally blind, but all that means is that I cannot read the top line of an eye chart. Using that phrase doesn’t let you know that I still have most of my peripheral vision, or that I still have enough vision to be a photographer or to play basketball (poorly). I have lost a lot in the past 18 months, I can no longer drive, cannot read without assistance, I am scared to cross a street when there’s not a pedestrian cross-walk, and six months ago, because of my vision, I retired from work and went on disability.
At times, like when I’m moving through an airport, I feel like I have a disability. At other times, like when I am out in nature, I barely feel my visual disability. Overall, I don’t feel blind, I feel kinda blind. ( BTW, if you are curious about what the world looks like to me, you can see photographic examples on my essay, How I See with Stargardt Disease).
With the hope that this site will live on for a while and be a reflection of who I am, I’m excited to transition from the name Losing My Vision to Kinda Blind. It feels like me, kinda…