I remember this story as the first time I really realized that my vision of colors is different to others. I suppose I knew before that I was suffering from color blindness, but I couldn’t really classify it until this morning at school. It was the my second year at primary school and we were painting with water colors. I am not a great painter, neither I was at that time but I colored a nice landscape. Some hills and grass, maybe a house, the sun, everything was nice and colorful until, yes until I started to fill in the sky.

Blue, of course it had to be blue. And what a nice blue I mixed together. So I started painting on one side making my way to the middle of the picture. Suddenly an other child stopped by started giggeling and pointed at my sky color.

Yes, what a shame, it was all pink.

I really felt ashame. How could I possibly mismatch those two colors? I tried to cover the messed up part of my picture but it didn’t really work out. So my sky was blueish-pinkish. Great. I remember that I couldn’t stand it that I colored this last part of my painting just with a completely wrong color. Color blindness simply presented on an otherwise wonderful piece of art. Now I even could make out the difference. As soon as they told me, I could see that I have chosen the wrong color. But it was to late, to late to fix it. What a shame.

Is color blindness something to be ashamed of? You say no; I say no but sometimes I just feel so. Ashamed of not being able to tell if it matches or if something is of the right color or just choosing the wrong color and everybody can see it and then – afterwards – I realise it too. My color blindness I think is nothing to be ashamed of but sometimes I just am.