[serious] Redditors who were born blind/deaf/etc: At what age did you become aware that other people had senses you didn’t? How were those senses conceptualized to you as a kid?

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1. I was born mostly blind (enough to be considered legally blind), and there is never a time I did not know everyone else could see more than me.

   I imagine it is the same with someone totally blind. Like, there’s never a time when your parents don’t know what you’re doing from across the room, even when you’re trying to be sneaky and not make noise. Everyone talks about seeing, about what colours things are, reading stories from books that might as well be blank to you.

   I don’t know if someone totally blind from birth can imagine what seeing is actually like, in the same way that I, being mostly blind, cannot grok eye contact. But they still grow up knowing that everyone else can see when they cannot, just like I know people make eye contact, even though I have no idea what that’s actually like.

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2. I have no sense of smell (which, I know, is small fry for a question like this) and never have. When I was a kid I never really questioned why I couldn’t detect this thing that everyone else talked about–if someone, say, stuck their foot in my face as a joke I’d just go, “Phew!” and hold my nose and pretend it smelled bad because I knew it was supposed to. I guess I thought everyone just exaggerated.

   Only when I was older, like eleven or so, it struck me that, actually, there’s probably something wrong with me. And when I got even older I connected the dots that the lack of smell is probably also the reason that it’s almost impossible for me to detect and identify flavours off the top of my head. I do have a sense of taste, I just think it’s dulled compared to other people’s.

   My best friend has tried various different ways to conceptualise smells to me, like as colours or experiences, but I just can’t wrap my head around what a smell would feel like. I assume kind of like a taste, just in your nose–but even that’s not a great help. Once I cried because I pushed my face into the ruff of my elderly, not-long-for-this-world cat’s neck and breathed deep and hated–HATED–that I couldn’t smell her; couldn’t keep that memory with me. My friend tried to console me that “she probably just smells clean.” But that just made me cry harder because I have no idea what “clean” is. My whole life I’d never really cared that I couldn’t smell–kinda liked the “weird factor” it gave me, even. But in that moment I felt so disconnected from the world.

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3. My kindergarten teacher had a deaf son, she taught us the alphabet through sign language and really instilled empathy at a young age.

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