“How many fingers am I holding up?” People love to ask that when they find out you have bad eyesight. But that’s exactly how I realised I was going blind.

In December 2010, I was 21 and had just begun my second year training to be an actor in London. I’d been doing 12-hour rehearsals, six days a week. When I stretched out my arm and looked at my hand, I couldn’t see where one finger ended and another began. I went to an optician, and was promptly sent to the Royal Free hospital.

My optic nerves had swollen up. Frustratingly, no one knew why. The doctors thought I might have brain tumours or cancer, so they sent me for a CT scan. Afterwards, in the lift, the nurse confided that everything looked fine. I was kept in, and passed from specialist to specialist. I showed no other symptoms – no headaches, loss of balance or dizziness. After two weeks, I was discharged, just in time to join my family for Christmas.

Going home made it all feel real. I had been given a course of steroids to reduce the swelling. They didn’t work. I was scared; I cried, and was emotionally exhausted. It was hard watching my younger brothers open their presents, unsure if that was the last Christmas I’d see them do it. They already looked soft around the edges.

By the new year, I’d lost the majority of my eyesight: all I saw was a flesh-coloured blur, except for a very small amount of peripheral vision. I didn’t want to sit around my parents’ house waiting for my sight to come back, so I decided to continue my studies. People often ask why I didn’t get a guide dog or a white cane, and the truth is I don’t know. Foolish pride, perhaps. A refusal to face the possibility that the damage might be permanent. Glasses wouldn’t have helped the swollen optic nerves that were obstructing my vision.

Over the next six months I was not an ideal actor to work with. In one production, I knocked over the only piece of set there was – a tree. I played Macbeth and lost my dagger during the “Is this a dagger which I see before me” scene. Once, I thought I saw a classmate hunched over, crying, during rehearsals. It was, in fact, a table.

Friends cooked for me, steered me around puddles and helped me tackle stairs. We joked about my blindness together. Sometimes, if I put a glass down they would move it a small distance and watch with delight as I tapped around trying to find it; I loved it, because I knew I hadn’t become a burden tolerated only out of pity. One night, drunk with some friends, I danced with Amy Winehouse without realising until later; as she walked by, she said, “Nice dancing” and high-fived me.

I was incredibly grateful for music, but I missed books and films a lot. Most of all, I missed faces. Every night for the first three months, I dreamed about my day, replaying it, but with the faces this time.

One day, a year or so after my eyesight went, I was walking down the street with two friends. They stopped to queue at a cash machine. “There’s another cash machine inside,” I pointed out, and stopped. Did I just read that? I looked again, and there it was in the window. The printed words: “There’s another cash machine inside.”

Off I went down the road, full of glee, repeating the phrase to passersby, who must have thought I’d lost my mind.

At the opticians, I cried when the man put the apparatus on me and some big black letters came screeching into focus. I could only manage the first row or two, but it was enough. I left as the proud owner of glasses with lenses so thick they made me look like a serial killer from the 1970s.

I never found out what caused my optic nerves to swell. Every time I visited the hospital for a check up, nothing new was done. I moved from London to Liverpool and stopped going.

When you lose something you’ve always taken for granted, you value it all the more when it returns. Almost 10 years on, I still have a mixture of good and bad eye days. My field of vision has very tiny green, red and blue specks, which my brain has learned to look past. I still knock over the odd glass.

But I can read. And write. And see faces. And the lines on the palm of my hand are cool, too. Oh, and three. You’re holding three fingers up.

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