Imagine you are disarming a bomb and you are in that stereotypical situation where you got to cut the right wire. In this case, the three wires are red, orange, and yellow. Now, the guy talking to you over the phone tells you to cut the orange wire to disarm the bomb, so you then successfully cut the wire. The bomb is disabled and the crisis averted. Now imagine you are in the same scenario but all the wires look yellow to you, and the guy over the phone is telling you to cut the orange wire. You start thinking he’s crazy as he starts screaming at you because you can’t tell there is more than one color. So now you have some dude screaming at you while this bomb is about to go off. Welcome to the rough life of a colorblind person (but not really).

People often believe that being colorblind must be really tough or annoying.  Like, it must suck to not be able to tell the difference between certain colors or not be able to see the “right” color. This assumption is true, but not to a certain extent as well. As someone who has Deutan Red-Green colorblindness, being colorblind is not as dreadful as what people might think (unless you have black-white colorblindness then that’s just really rough). That’s why I am going to show why it can be sometimes good and also why it’s bad in a way you probably wouldn’t have thought about before. Hopefully, this will open your eyes to the life of a colorblind person.

Benefits

Before talking about the benefits I want to go over why it’s really not that life-threatening or awful. Most people with colorblindness have a very mild case (like me) where only certain hues are deficient. In my case, I can’t see red and green hues very well and they start to blend together. My perception of colors is really not that skewed, as I can tell the colors of most things. Here is a visual example of what I see compared to you:

It’s not as different as you might think it would be. Like people often ask me how I distinguish signal lights or would I be able to tell the difference between the deadly and safe berries in the wild. These are first of all really stupid questions, as I just see which of the three lights are light up, and when will I ever be eating berries in the wild. Like only in certain circumstances it would be bad to be colorblind is if you were an air pilot or an electrician.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to the benefits. You would think not being able to see certain hues would be a disability, but it allows distinguish patterns and textures better than the normal person. What’s most surprising to people is that people with Red-Green colorblindness can detect camouflage better than people with no colorblindness. Take a look:

To the left, you have the full-color image, and to the right, you have the colorblind version. On the left, there are more green hues, so it would blend in with the leaves pretty well (if the soldier was submerged a bit more), but on the right, there are three distinct greens. The patterns pop out more rather than the color which allows colorblind individuals to spot the camo easier. Though they can see camo better, colorblind people are very unlikely to get drafted into the army or be put in the field at all. Also, being able to tell certain textures can help in other industries such as fashion, graphic design, and digital art industries (also industries others might not think colorblind people would od well in).

Other than patterns, I personally benefited from it socially. You might not expect to benefit someone in that way, but it definitely helps me out at certain times. This is especially true when having to do icebreakers or trying to start a conversation with some stranger. When I mention I am colorblind, it sparks an interesting conversation. Most of the time the other person usually start off the same by asking me the color of certain objects, but then they talk about what they think about and how they would deal with it, which is pretty interesting. It moves on from the really uncomfortable introductory questions to something interesting to talk about while the other person is able to learn something about me. Often times they think it’s cool too as they don’t pity me. Then, it also segways to more interesting conversation about each other. Thus acting as a crutch for meeting new people or making new friends sometimes.

Why it sucks 

Let’s start with a basic colorblind test:

https://enchroma.com/pages/color-blind-test

Hopefully, you faired better than I did. I couldn’t see almost half of the numbers thrown at me and all the ones I could see were blatantly obvious. Well, this is expected as I am colorblind, but you could only imagine how this might affect me in doing daily tasks. Though I don’t struggle with necessary skills or tasks, it can get very annoying very quickly. Here’s a list of some of my many struggles:

• Coloring anything (takes so long going through all the colors pencils and looking at the side of the pencil to check for the right color)
• Trying to color-coordinate my clothes for a certain theme
• Can’t tell if the fruit is ripe or not
• Can’t see all the different colors of the leaves and the flowers in fall
• Can’t tell if the meat is raw or not

This is just a shortlist of some of the stupid problems I have to deal with. They do get really annoying. They don’t seem very troubling, but you have not accidentally colored your civil war soldier in 5th-grade purple instead of blue or accidentally wore an orange shirt on Saint Patrick’s day when you were supposed to wear green.

Though people (non-colorblind)do predict these struggles, they fail to think how annoying they can be to colorblind people. I don’t think people know that colorblind people get really annoyed when they constantly ask what color something is or how annoying it is to be repeatedly asked to take a colorblind test. Like asking once is fine, but they don’t believe it until they ask you like fifty times. Literally, why would I want to be colorblind or lie about it? I am used to it now, but I am sure it’s really annoying for others with colorblindness.

As I said before, it really isn’t that bad. Like I will never be in a life or death situation unless I am held by gunpoint and I have to get everything right on a colorblind test to go free. It definitely makes certain things a lot peskier, but there are certain benefits as well, which is nice. I hope from reading this that you kind of have an idea of what someone who is colorblind deals with and how it ain’t that bad.