Olivia Durant photographed through reflections at the Beechview branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Thursday, July 25, 2024. Durant describes the way she saw before her eye surgery at age 36 as being able to see a sliver magnified detail right in front of her eyes and then “only a white sheet of vague color and shape beyond that.” (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
Many would think gaining sight as an adult could only enhance a life. But for me, it brought a traumatic reckoning that only much later ended in flourishing.
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I went from blind at birth to sighted at age 36, and most people would probably see that as a miraculous gift. Instead, it nearly destroyed me and left me homeless in California. But the resilience I gained from growing up in Pittsburgh kept me together.
Gaining sight after decades of blindness was like becoming psychic overnight and unable to switch it off. Imagine being barely able to see and also feeling that was normal. Now I was flooded with forms and colors.
I will always vividly remember walking into a restaurant that had a wall mirror after my eye surgery that brought back my sight eight years ago. I accidentally said “hello” to myself, realized it was my reflection, and then scooted out the door as fast as I could to cry. I never ate lunch that day. I can only describe it as embarrassment, shock, fear and panic. The walls and other people’s eyes felt like they were closing in on me. The panic made me lose perspective of where I was standing, like a broken video game when you’re suddenly standing in the sky.
Nobody prepared me for the abrupt change of perspective my surgery would bring. In fact, nobody prepared me for life in the first place.
A troubled beginning
I grew up in Beechview. My birth parents abandoned me when I was just days old. I later heard that my mom left me with my maternal grandmother for “just a week” while she got settled in New York City. She didn’t come back until almost 10 years later and then immediately left again. I can’t completely fault my birth mother for being as out of control as she was. She also had to survive the house I was raised in.
My grandmother was extremely religious. Other parents did not consider my house safe, adding another layer of isolation. It was partially my disability, partially my situation. Now, in my life as a content creator, that is the hardest nuance to make clear in my YouTube and Instagram videos.
My family lived on a normal street, but existed in isolation as much as possible from the outside world. The contempt for anything regular people did was extreme.
My grandmother had 10 adult children already. Five of them never left home. Four dated or married. One left for work but eventually moved back into the communal house. I was the only child in the house. My grandmother largely abdicated responsibility of me to whichever one of her children was free that day.
I was only permitted to listen to 1950s music, to wear homemade clothing and I was forbidden from cutting my hair. Racial slurs were often used on me because my skin was a different color from theirs and considered shameful.
I was helped in this by Mr. Rogers, who told me I was nice just the way I am. In that case, I thought, they must be wrong. I may be the only Pittsburgher who was not allowed to watch Mr. Rogers, but I’d sneak into the attic, turn the TV on and put my ear on the speaker to listen. I was always ready to shut it off when I heard footsteps on the stairs.
These were the behaviors modeled for me as a child and from where I started my long, difficult self-development journey.
A journey to sight
Most people don’t understand that blindness is a spectrum.
There are so many things that can be wrong with your eyes to cause impaired vision. Only about 10% of blind people can’t see anything at all — the stereotypical black field of vision. In my case, I was extremely nearsighted. I had the equivalent of microscope lenses in my eyes, meaning I had hypermagnified detail up to about half the length of my eyelashes and a white sheet of vague color and shape beyond that. I had extreme floaters and flashes and what I can only describe as some sort of oil slick that moves. I can still see these when I close my eyes.
Starting at age 9, I had contact lenses that helped a little, but not enough to live a normal life. I was painfully shy and afraid of making a mistake and tripping. The lack of experience I had with people and the bullying I experienced at school didn’t help. Though there were some notable exceptions of support that we’ll get back to later, I mostly became afraid of people, mistrustful of authority, and happiest in my books.
Most schools were not prepared to deal with vision impairment at the time, and, in my case, you needed a parent or guardian to fill out forms to get you access to free programs. When I wasn’t even getting the food I needed at home, getting a signed form for free lunch tickets seemed such a tall order that I shut down and didn’t eat lunch for the year, claiming I wasn’t hungry.
I was forced to live as a sighted person out of neglect – and routinely felt close to failure. I went by memorization from what I could hear and piece together from my vague light and color perception. I smashed books up to my face, read three letters at a time and pieced the sentences together while rubbing my nose left and right on the page.
My body had failed me, and the system — which was supposed to look after a child’s best interests — also failed me.
I ran away at age 18 to go to college at Rutgers University in New Jersey. At that age, I was — wrongly — unable to separate our city from what happened to me.
Throughout college and beyond, I chose my friends and relationships poorly. Fast forward through my early years in the workforce, getting married and then being unsettled by receiving sight through surgery, my life turned upside down in 2016. I began the long and lonely process of stripping away who I was, and testing each bit of it to see if it really was me, or only something that someone told me I was.
Running toward the flames
Arriving at my new perspective brought who I was into question and some painful realizations about the choices I had made. I hadn’t escaped my family — I had only been preserved in amber. Same thing, different day.
I had to run again, but this time I had a new rule: I never run from anything — I always run to something.
So I ran to Los Angeles, the last place anyone would have ever thought someone like me would go, in part because I saw it as forced exposure therapy. Nobody can move to a new place alone and not be forced to talk to people. I didn’t know anyone who lived there and I felt like an alien fresh off a spaceship.
People along the way would take time out of their day to be there for me. People would bend the rules to sneak me into classes or community events I couldn’t afford. Sometimes it was just as simple as giving me something to eat. Other times it was people encouraging me to “hold my head up high” because I should be “proud of what I’ve accomplished” when I again had no family attending the award or graduation ceremonies at Margaret Milliones Middle School.
That is how I ended up divorced, broke and alone in an AirBnb in the High Desert just north of Los Angeles, crying at a washing machine because I didn’t know how to use it at age 36.
Learning how to use my eyes and live as a sighted person so far away from friends and then being hit with the 2020 lockdown culminated in the darkest five years of my life. The mental resilience tactics I had unknowingly cultivated in my childhood came out to save me. Imagine waking up every day in that horrible state when someone you love has just died. As you wake up and remember, the entire world drops down and you crash through the floor.
It was just like that, except everything I thought I knew about my life had died. I had to make lists that said things like “shower” and “get dressed” to coax myself out of bed. I had a work-from-home job that kept me going and gave me what I needed to slowly put the pieces of myself back together.
I celebrated a milestone birthday alone in a town I didn’t know while fighting a battle that most new friends couldn’t or wouldn’t relate to — but my Pittsburgh friends didn’t have to relate to it. They simply had my back long distance no matter what.
Formed in Pittsburgh, flourishing globally
Years later, I managed to rebuild my life — a new, far better one. And for that, I drew on the bright spots that led me through my troubled youth.
Where my family and the health care system failed me, the people of Pittsburgh — and its beloved institutions — didn’t.
During my turbulent school years, the Carnegie Library, the Buhl Planetarium, the Community College of Allegheny County, the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, and the many librarians, schoolteachers and staff came through. They may have been powerless to fix the system but they helped me get access to free education, a safe place, food and, most importantly, the family I needed in a time when the internet was not yet in everyone’s home.
Most times, it was people providing me a safe space to learn and be a kid, like the Carnegie Library, where the annual Halloween Party was my favorite. Or launching rockets in the Young Astronauts program at the Buhl Planetarium with safe adults who taught me to reach for the stars. I drew on all this in rebuilding my new life as a tech worker, speaker and content creator.
Pittsburgh has a unique culture of community and honest action that you just don’t see everywhere. I believe we are all born into Steel Town resilience, and that was passed on to me. The blunt honesty, good sense of humor and fearlessness helped me empower myself out of a less-than-happy beginning, through my darkest time, into a very successful life with the confidence to share my story on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
I don’t just want to be successful, though. I want to make a difference. Hard times show you who you are and bring clarity to your life’s purpose. I was able to save myself along with my chosen family of Pittsburgh advocates who saw something wrong with the system at large and did something about it.
Those are the values I learned growing up, not because they were modeled to me at home, but because they weren’t. Because I felt what it was like to receive kindness when I had none. It was because of all of you that I was able to see that it really was “…a beautiful day in this neighborhood.” That makes me proud to be from Pittsburgh, no matter where life takes me.
Olivia Durant is a content creator, speaker and technologist born in Pittsburgh and now living in Los Angeles. Follow her on instagram @OniDurant or find her content on Youtube @OliviaDurant.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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