NASHVILLE — I can tell you the exact moment I realized my voice was broken.

I was sitting in a cubicle inside Pulitzer Hall, the home of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I was on the phone with a former top official at U.S.A. Hockey — a man whose name I knew well from having grown up a hockey fan. He was supposed to give me an interview for my master’s project, a large journalism assignment that most other graduate students would compare to a thesis. I was excited for the help and also excited to speak to someone so well known to me. Then he said it.

“I’m sorry. I want to help you, but I can’t understand you.”

His words did not shock me; I had known for a long time that my voice was failing me. But what he said, with unintended cruel clarity, signaled to me that the moment had come. Later that day I — a 23-year-old Tennessee boy making good in New York City — called my mother and cried.

I was born in Nashville in the summer of 1990. A year later, it became clear to my parents that I could not see well, and by the time I was 2 years old, tests revealed that I was completely blind. As far as my family was concerned, this was of no matter. I was raised to think with no limits. For many years I attended public schools with sighted students, getting in trouble for the usual things like running in the halls. On my own decision, I began attending the state school for the blind when I was 11, where I played sports and graduated as the school’s valedictorian.

When I was a senior in high school, a doctor noticed during a routine exam that my voice sounded abnormal to him. Further testing disclosed nine noncancerous tumors located on cranial nerves, which control almost everything about how the body’s extremities work.