What Color Is It?

Rain, rain, go away...

Today started out gloomy. The day started with dark skies, with large looming clouds, with not a lick of sunshine anywhere. To further enhance the day, there was a forecast of more rain. Again.

The Midwest, where we live, has been inundated with rain — lots of it. Life with myopic macular degeneration makes these gloomy days hard to live with.

Trouble seeing indoors on gloomy days

No matter how many window blinds I open, no matter how many lights I turn on, the house has a gloomy cast about it. All of this creates a challenge for me, a challenge that I can almost forget about at times.

Today, I had set aside a portion of my day to work on my new adult coloring book. A silly pastime, but it is one that really helps feed my need to "art" when I do not have a new project to work on.

To successfully do this, I need my surroundings to be bright — much brighter than the average person, I think. It is in this gloom-created environment that I have many struggles.

A new coloring book

My newest coloring book I chose to work on was a silly edition. This book is called The Hidden Creatures Coloring Book by Ase Balko. I enjoy this mindless time coloring abstract shapes on a page while searching for the hidden creature on it.

I use various mediums: colored pencils, crayons, or colored markers. Today's choice was colored pencils. I have a huge collection of pencils, so thus began the activity of the afternoon.

MMD's impact on color perception

I do not put much thought into the color selections, randomly grabbing whatever strikes my fancy. There are many varieties of color choices, and herein was the moment when myopic macular degeneration made its annoying presence known.

I tend to work in patterns of color choices, and I started with a basic blue — navy blue to be specific. The plan was to work my way through the variety of blue colors that I have.

I next grabbed what was to be the next shade of blue in my collection to add it to the picture. The problem was, it was not blue. It was definitely not blue. It was green. A very deep shade of green.

Fortunately, it was pencil, and I could quickly remedy this selection, covering what was incorrect with the correct shade of blue. Annoying. I told myself, "You need to check more carefully before moving forward with this coloring exercise."

The battle of color selection

This afternoon's session of coloring turned into a battle of selection. Life with MMD has taken away my ability to effectively distinguish the differences in certain colors. Is it black or is it blue? Or maybe even a deep shade of brown?

Honestly, this is not earth-shattering by any means, but in the day-to-day life journey, color recognition can be of vital importance. The life lesson is this: carefully check and then recheck the exact color needed or wanted, ultimately asking, "What color is it?"