My greatest flex is that I see the world differently than you

The title might sound impressive, but honestly, this whole blog is me yapping or whatever the writing equivalent of that is about being colorblind.

Now, to the audience who’s unfamiliar with colorblindness: no, I don’t see in black and white. Apparently my special ability is that I can’t see certain shades of red and green, which is the most common kind of color blindness, which took away my excitement when I learned about it. My specific genes decided to give me colorblindness, but they gave me the most common type. And here I thought I was special.

Mid 2023, somewhere in Bangalore. Andrew and I were watching Breaking Bad, and he was explaining how the color of the clothes the character was wearing had significance to the plot. I don’t exactly remember what color Walter White was wearing, but I remember it being something like maroon-ish, and it had something to do with the plot, idk not important here.

Andrew pointed that out, and I was like, “Where’s that color? I can’t see it on the screen.” After a few minutes of staring at the screen, all I saw was some shade of red. Andrew then made me take the Ishihara Test, and kids, that’s how I learned I was colorblind.

Now, this is what the colorblind test looks like, if you can read the number in the image below, you’re okay, you’re just okay. But if you can’t, I’ve got an exciting news for you, or not-so-exciting news, congratulations, you’re colorblind.

This image shows how colorblind people see the world, and for me I absolutely see no difference between normal vision and deuteranomaly.

So, as usual, whenever I have good or bad news, I call my dad. I was like, “Appa, I’m colorblind,” and I told him about my mutant ability. And bro, he was like, “Yeah, I think I knew.” Thing is, Appa and I used to harvest nutmegs at our home, and nutmegs have a red wrapping around the black seed. Whenever he’d point at the nutmegs lying on the ground or on the tree, I used to find it really hard to spot the red color among the green leaves or on the brown soil. I hope the soil is brown, at this point, I’ve given up naming colors correctly.

Now the fun part is when I tell people I’m colorblind and they start pointing at an object and asking me its color, as if I can’t see blue or mlue or whatever color they’re pointing at. It’s all fun and games until they start pointing at brown and green and shades of yellow or orange, which I almost always mess up. I always mix up shades of brown for shades of green, and sometimes shades of yellow/orange/green, I mess up all three. This basically means I am of zero use if you take me with you to shop for clothes.

I finally did some research around colorblindness, and apparently it can only be inherited through the X chromosome, which means I got this fancy little skill from a very avid reader of my blog… നന്നി ഉണ്ട് മാതവേ നന്നി ഉണ്ട്. I made my mom take the test today and apparently we have more in common than I thought.

Folks over at Reddit say there are advantages to being colorblind, the number one being a conversation starter, small talk conversation starter kit it seems. Jokes aside, colorblind people reportedly can see through camouflage. I don’t know, I haven’t tried it yet, or haven’t had the chance to, or maybe I didn’t even know that was a trait. They also say there’s better pattern recognition. I wish I could say the same, because I suck at detecting red flags… pun intended.

But one thing I’ve noticed is that I get less distracted by color, which also means none of the ads that rely on color theory work on me, or at least I hope so. I’ve also noticed that I tend to look at the geometry of objects more than their color.

This has never affected me in my daily life, in fact I did not know I was colorblind for over twently years of my life. But that’s the story of how I learned that I see the world differently than 92% of humans.