Sometimes, as I begin my journey without sight, I feel and notice really big absences in my life. Things like my work that I’ve done for over 22 years, or not being able to see the faces of my loved ones. These are big dramatic things that if I think too much about them, it will make me want to curl up in a ball and never leave the house again. However, along with all of the big things that make going blind so difficult and painful, there are also a multitude of smaller, seemingly inconsequential, things that are also difficult.

I encountered one such “small” thing today while going through my e-mail. For some background, I have long been a pen, pencil and stationery nerd. I love everything about those things. I thoroughly enjoyed taking notes by hand with my fountain pen on nice paper. I carried a Field Notes brand notebook with me everywhere and always had a pen in my pocket. I bought nice Blackwing pencils and even dreamed of crafting my own pocket notebooks one day. My father even bought a Kelsey letterpress printing machine that we were hoping to use to print custom notebook covers.

Now, back to my e-mail this morning. I receive a decent amount of stationery adjacent e-mails and have for years. They often will feature the latest edition of notebook or pen that I would wish for. But, now that I am blind, these e-mails don’t hit the same. In fact, they either make me sad or at best, I’m ambivalent about them, which in a way, also makes me sad. As a result, I’ve been unsubscribing from all of these marketing e-mails recently which has dramatically decreased what I get daily in e-mail form. After unsubscribing to a few more I found myself thinking how going blind has stolen so much from me. It has left so many voids that I am struggling to fill, especially in my interests and hobbies.

Being perfectly honest, I have yet to find much of anything to replace what I’ve lost. I am not giving up on finding new things to find joy in, it will just have to look a lot different from what I used to love.