The first time I met Sarah, it didn’t feel like meeting a stranger—it felt like finally finding someone who spoke a language I had been struggling to translate my whole life. We found each other in an online chatroom for people with disabilities, a small corner of the internet where blindness wasn’t something to apologize for or explain; it was simply part of who we were. What began as a casual exchange turned, almost immediately, into the kind of connection that makes you pause and wonder how many near-misses in life happen before someone like this enters it.
We talked first about blindness—about the way we navigated the world, the little hacks we each had, the frustrations that only someone who lived it could understand. But the conversation unfolded quickly into deeper territory. We both lived with mental-health struggles, and there was a strange comfort in admitting that to someone who didn’t flinch or judge. Even more unexpected was discovering that we both had dissociative identity disorder. It’s rare to meet someone who genuinely understands what that means in lived experience—the shifts, the uncertainty, the complexity, the strength it takes to move through each day. For the first time in a long time, I felt not just heard, but known.
What stood out most in those early conversations was how naturally everything flowed. There was no need to perform, no pressure to hide the parts of myself that had always felt “too much” for other people. With Sarah, I could simply exist. And she could too.
When we decided I would visit her in Colorado, it felt like a leap, but also like the most natural next step in the world. I remember the nervous excitement in the days leading up to the trip—the kind that sits in your chest, fluttering between anticipation and disbelief. Stepping into her world for the first time didn’t feel foreign or frightening. It felt like arriving somewhere I was already familiar with, a place built from months of honesty, trust, and shared experience.
That month in Colorado was a kind of quiet healing neither of us had really expected. We laughed more loudly and more often than we had in years. We had long conversations that stretched late into the night, conversations that wandered through disability, mental health, survival, identity, healing, and all the tiny, ordinary things that make two people feel like they’ve known each other forever. There were moments of comfort, moments of grounding, moments of simply sitting in the presence of someone who understood in ways that didn’t need explanation.
Looking back, meeting Sarah—first on a screen, then in person—felt like being handed a small piece of home in the middle of a confusing world. It wasn’t dramatic or cinematic; it was steady, warm, and real. And sometimes, that kind of connection is the most life-changing kind of all.
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