I was born with very low vision, then it was stable from birth to 16, when I lost some difficult to measure amount, and then stable again until the year I started law school when my left eye imploded entirely. So functionally speaking, these days I'm working out of the far right corner of my right eye (no central vision at all). This is why when you're sitting and talking to me, I'm generally tilting my face left. Acuity is too low to put a number on it. My retinologist uses a scale where I can see large hand gestures at about 18 inches, but not much farther, and not enough acuity to count fingers, generally. Which is basically where I've always been, in broad strokes -- it's one of those things where the losses were a much bigger deal to me functionally than could be accurately measured, just because I was starting from such little vision anyway. And I'm a bit of an outlier in terms of what I get out of what I have -- I'm far more mobile and spatially aware than a lot of people in my place on the scale. Shrug.
So writingwise -- and this is interesting you asked about this, because I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about it. For writing, I think a lot of it was/is simple mimicry. People write visually, I learned what images they associate with what. And I wasn't always good at it -- I'd have betas tell me 'that doesn't make visual sense,' that sort of thing. And I always suspected I lacked visual metaphor creativity. Various people told me over time that my writing isn't very visual at all, but tends to engage much more seriously with the other senses. I can't tell, but it seems reasonable. I used to worry about it, like my writing was missing something, but I got over that invisibly at some point, and in the process became a lot more willing to throw something creative out there.
So tldr, but these days, when I pop out with a visual image, it may be reflexive mimicry, my brain spitting back out something I heard somewhere. But it also might be something I've experienced -- looking at something through something, for example, is familiar to me. Particularly looking at something through a clouded lens versus a clear one (I actually had a cataract a few years back, if you want to be really literal about it). But also, visual images are often not just visual. The words we use for them often have texture or mood or shading. Like the pane of glass, I said "scrubbed," which correlates to clean, not just to transparency. And I think a lot of what I'm doing with visual metaphors is engaging with them on other levels like that. That's where the creativity is coming from: choosing the words/image out of the stack I've absorbed that fits in a broader sense than the visual.
As for clothes, I just really, really enjoy them. And have good friends with opinions when I want them.
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I was born with very low vision, then it was stable from birth to 16, when I lost some difficult to measure amount, and then stable again until the year I started law school when my left eye imploded entirely. So functionally speaking, these days I'm working out of the far right corner of my right eye (no central vision at all). This is why when you're sitting and talking to me, I'm generally tilting my face left. Acuity is too low to put a number on it. My retinologist uses a scale where I can see large hand gestures at about 18 inches, but not much farther, and not enough acuity to count fingers, generally. Which is basically where I've always been, in broad strokes -- it's one of those things where the losses were a much bigger deal to me functionally than could be accurately measured, just because I was starting from such little vision anyway. And I'm a bit of an outlier in terms of what I get out of what I have -- I'm far more mobile and spatially aware than a lot of people in my place on the scale. Shrug.
So writingwise -- and this is interesting you asked about this, because I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about it. For writing, I think a lot of it was/is simple mimicry. People write visually, I learned what images they associate with what. And I wasn't always good at it -- I'd have betas tell me 'that doesn't make visual sense,' that sort of thing. And I always suspected I lacked visual metaphor creativity. Various people told me over time that my writing isn't very visual at all, but tends to engage much more seriously with the other senses. I can't tell, but it seems reasonable. I used to worry about it, like my writing was missing something, but I got over that invisibly at some point, and in the process became a lot more willing to throw something creative out there.
So tldr, but these days, when I pop out with a visual image, it may be reflexive mimicry, my brain spitting back out something I heard somewhere. But it also might be something I've experienced -- looking at something through something, for example, is familiar to me. Particularly looking at something through a clouded lens versus a clear one (I actually had a cataract a few years back, if you want to be really literal about it). But also, visual images are often not just visual. The words we use for them often have texture or mood or shading. Like the pane of glass, I said "scrubbed," which correlates to clean, not just to transparency. And I think a lot of what I'm doing with visual metaphors is engaging with them on other levels like that. That's where the creativity is coming from: choosing the words/image out of the stack I've absorbed that fits in a broader sense than the visual.
As for clothes, I just really, really enjoy them. And have good friends with opinions when I want them.