How Coloring a Tree Landed Me in the Doctor's Office

My mom flipped through the small ring-bound book and pointed to one of the pages.

“What number is that?”

“Uh, 7?” I guessed.

“Are you sure?” she asked, her brow furrowing. “What about this one?”

She flipped to another page and showed it to me.

I glanced at the disk of differently sized colorful bubbles.

“There’s nothing in that one,” I said with confidence.

While waiting for the doctor to call us into the exam area, my mother and I continued perusing the book. Some of the colorful bubble pictures had numbers in them. In one, a seven made of blue disks stood out against a background of green disks. In another, a red four amidst purple bubbles. Other pages were just fields of different shades of the same color with no recognizable pattern. My mother was clearly flustered by my answers. She stopped at one of the numberless pages.

“You really don’t see anything there?”

“Nope.”

“It’s a three, Daniel.”

“What?”

“There’s a 3 right there. It’s green. You can’t see it?” she asked, incredulous, tracing a 3 against the featureless field of red bubbles.

“No. It’s just a bunch of red bubbles.”

“The background is red. The three is green. Look closer.”

I did not like disappointing the adults around me. I felt that cold, sinking feeling in my stomach that I got when I knew I was giving the wrong answer. While I tried to make sense of the page, the door opened and a nurse stuck her head into the waiting room.

“Maul-chalin?” she asked, pronouncing the ch like the ch in "cheese."

“It’s Maolchalann,” my mom said, raising her hand. She said it “mowl-hall-in” with the “h” coming from somewhere in the back of her throat. No one ever pronounced our name correctly.

“Come on back, the doctor is waiting for you.”

She took us back to the doctor’s office, where he sat us in front of his desk. He took his seat behind the desk and administered a test that played out similarly to the events in the waiting room. The doctor showed me pictures from the same book, copying my responses into a form. Once we had worked our way through the book, he explained to me what was going on.

“Daniel, have you been having trouble with colors in school?”

I nodded my head.

“No one sees everything the same way. We all see the world a little differently. However, you’re having trouble because you see things a little differently than everyone else. Have you had trouble telling the colors brown and green apart?”

“I can tell them apart. Brown is usually darker than green,” I told him, offended that he thought that I couldn’t tell my colors apart. I thought for a bit, then added, “But sometimes you need to guess because they’re too close together,”

“Other people don’t have to guess, Daniel.”

I could feel my mother staring at me while the doctor waited for this sink in. I always had to guess whether something was brown or green or whether or not something was purple or blue. I assumed everyone else did too, but that they were just better at guessing than me.

“You have to guess because your eyes don’t see color the same way other people do. There are sensors in your eyes that tell the difference between green and red. They don’t work as well as the sensors in other people’s eyes, so some colors end up looking the same to you.”

The doctor proceeded to explain what it means to be colorblind. The bubble pictures all had numbers in them, but I was not able to see the numbers when the number and background were distinct colors that my eyes couldn’t differentiate. I sat quietly and listened, becoming more and more horrified. While it was a relief to know that I was not stupid for not being able to tell the difference between green and brown or blue and purple, I was deeply disturbed by the fact that I could not see what other people saw.

I took the book and looked at the bubble pictures again, trying to wrap my head around the fact that I was looking at the same thing as my mother, while seeing something different. I remembered earlier in the week when my teacher and all the students had gotten angry at me for the way I had colored a tree.

***

I had colored the trunk a darker green-brown color and the leaves a lighter green-brown color. The child next to me had told me I was doing it wrong. I told them, no, this is what trees look like. The child got more and more agitated and had called over the teacher.

“Teacher, he’s coloring his tree backwards!”

The teacher leaned over my shoulder.

“Daniel, you need to color your tree the right way.”

“This is the right way.”

“Don’t be a smart Aleck,” he said, irritated. “Color the leaves green and the trunk brown.”

“Teacher, I am. This is green,” I said, pointing to the leaves, and then I pointed to the trunk, “and this is brown.”

The teacher left and came back with a fresh coloring sheet. Exasperated, he took my tree, and slapped the new sheet with an uncolored tree in front of me.

“This time do it right.”

***

I had been extremely confused. The teacher and the child next to me had been upset, but I could not understand why. Considering what the doctor had just told me, maybe I really had been using the wrong crayons. If I could not see colors the way other people did, even if my tree looked right to me, maybe it looked different to everyone else? How was I supposed to know when I was getting it wrong though? Being in second grade, a lot of school activities revolved around coloring this or that with particular colors or figuring out what word the red letters spelled out vs the green letters. How was I going to get good grades in school if I could not tell colors apart?

I was not able to articulate it at that young age, but I began to sense that I was living in a different world than everyone else. The people around me were telling me that the world was other than what I was seeing. Not only was I cut off and segregated from their reality, I had never been a part of their reality.

As I sat and recalled more instances of color related difficulty, the omnipresence of my colorblindness impressed itself on me. I had never been able to differentiate certain colors, and it had always caused me problems, beginning in preschool when they thought I was stupid for not being able to name colors on flashcards.

If people did not rely on color so much to identify objects (“color the nouns red” or “hand me the green cup”), it is possible that I might have gone longer without understanding the difference between my experience of the world and the experience of the average person.

It is shocking to realize that our experience of the same event or object can differ drastically from those of another person, but it can be so. Maybe it is often so. We don’t communicate in terms of experience. We communicate with references to experience. This philosophical concept was made clear to me at a young age by my colorblindness. When we speak a word, like “red” or “dog”, we are using a reference (the word) to refer to a referent (the thing in the world). Making the distinction between the reference and the referent is extremely messy, and it is almost never necessary unless there is some confusion between two parties in terms of what there reference maps on to.

For example, if someone asks, “Please hand me the blue dress,” and you hand them the blue dress but they shake their head and say, “No, the blue dress,” you both have to pause what and try and figure out what referent the reference blue refers to.

After a bit of discussion, you might find that the person considers what you handed them to be turquoise and the neighboring dress you would have called navy to be the blue dress.

This scenario is easily navigated unless you are shopping with your mother-in-law and this difference between reference and referent sparks an argument about colors and about “how you always have to have your way” and “why are you so contradictory” and “you need to work on your control issues”—which, of course is not something that has ever happened to me and is probably not relatable for anyone.

When the doctor explained to me that I am colorblind, my young brain started to wrap itself around the fact that the world of internal experiences is different from person to person and only tenuously linked to an external objective reality that could be far different from what our perceptions would have us suspect.

In the proper development of the human psyche, such concepts should occur at 2am after the first Philosophy 101 lecture and after smoking copious amounts of weed.

“Whoa, man. What if green is, like, totally a different color for other people? What if what I see as green, you see as blue? How would we even know, maaaaaaaaan?!”

The realization that I have a problem with colors and that I need to rely on others to help me sometimes was upsetting, but I could cope with it. The hard part, which I was, to put it mildly, completely unprepared for, was the realization that humanity is a collective of partially intersecting internal realities and that we are all trapped alone inside our skulls, kept prisoner by our perceptive faculties. It was as close to Lovecraftian horror as a 7 year old is able to get.

My mother and the doctor did their best to help me cope with my trouble differentiating colors. What they could not prepare me for was becoming a herald of existential terror. Upon returning to school, I eagerly explained my colorblindness to everyone. I was sick of being mocked for coloring things improperly, and that largely stopped once I explained my disability to the other children. Some of the children didn’t believe me at first, but soon everyone was helping me pick out the right crayons or colored pencils.

The teachers were a completely different story. My explanations of colorblindness were frequently met with incredulity and requests for a demonstration. Some teachers would stop in the middle of what they were doing and direct all of their attention on me, fascinated by the fact that I could not see what they saw. Even at the age of seven, I understood that I was the first person to have ever told these adults that not everyone experiences the world the same way. They repeatedly questioned my explanation, and they would go find crayons or colored construction paper to hold up in front of me for identification, wanting me to prove that I was colorblind. They would eventually believe me but be visibly shaken up, presumably gazing into the same philosophical chasm that swallowed me in the doctor’s office: the realization that we are all alone in our experience.

In retrospect, colorblindness is not that rare, and the teachers must have had colorblind students before. I suppose that means that I was the first to ever speak up, and that the teachers interpreted the other children’s difficulty as willful disobedience or idiocy. In the rural USA, the 80’s and 90’s were tough times for a child with differences to grow up. Not everyone was narrow-minded, but there were a lot of people that would not accept an account of the world if it did not perfectly mesh with their own. No one wanted to consider the possibility that their experience and interpretation of reality might not be authoritative—that other people might have other stories to tell.

In some ways, colorblindness was the easiest kind of difference to have. It is scientifically documented as having a physical cause. There is a diagnosis for it. I was capable of convincing people that my experience was real and that I was a reliable narrator of my own story, even if that story differed from their own. Other differences were not and are still not accepted as valid. That immigrant, trans, black, disabled, and queer people might have a different story to tell was and is inconceivable for a lot of people.

I blame that in equal parts on insecurity and on a failure of imagination. The idea that you may not be seeing the world correctly is strange and scary. If you are not the sole arbiter of the world’s story, then making sense of your town, your life, your history requires bringing other people in. If what you are seeing is not the complete picture or not reliable, you have to depend on others to fill in the gaps and risk believing friends, relatives, and strangers. You are forced to consider the new and unfamiliar, and you are forced to decide who to trust. It is hard work, and it is scary to piece together a picture of the world based on what other people tell you, but it is the only way, because we all have our blind spots. That work never ends either. You’ll never have a complete picture, and you’ll always have to keep asking other people what they are seeing. I am reminded of this every time I am coloring with my child. I still have to ask if I have the right colored pencil in hand.