Does Your Personality Change If You Lose Your Sight?

I was out with a friend last week who takes a healthy interest in exactly what makes people tick. She didn’t know me earlier in life, when I could see, and said she couldn’t help but wonder. “Do you think your personality changed when you went blind?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t find the question offensive, I just didn’t have an answer, so I brushed it off with a laugh. ”You should ask Mike that,” I said, certain he’d know better than I would (Mike and I celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary this year, and I lost my sight a year after we got married).

The question has been on my mind off and on since then. What does personality mean, exactly? What would you say if a friend asked you to describe your personality? Would you keep it simple, use words like shy, ambitious, angry, pleasant, that sort of thing? If I could only use one word to describe what my personality was when I could see, I’d say I was “outgoing.”

I’m still outgoing now, but to be that way when you can’t see other people, say, at a crowded party (where it’s hard to move around to schmooze), or out with friends at loud restaurants (where it’s hard to know if someone is talking to you without seeing their lips moving) I need to be resourceful. So did blindness change my personality from outgoing to resourceful?

Contemporary personality psychologists believe there are five core personality traits. Researchers don’t always agree on the exact labels for each personality trait, but I’m going with these five. Why? Because you can use the acronym OCEAN to remember them:

• Openness
• Conscientiousness
• Extroversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Using those words, I suppose I displayed more extroversion when I could see, and I display more conscientiousness now. But then there’s this: Can we really determine what our own personality is? Maybe that’s better left for others to judge.

Years ago a local newspaper reporter at an event I was doing at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn discovered that one of the workers there, Jenny Fischer, has been friends of mine since high school. “Was Beth funny when she could see?” he asked her. “Or did she get a sense of humor after she lost her sight?”

My sister Bev is the one closest to me in age, and she marvels at my ability to get around on my own in Chicago. “You were scared of everything when we were little, “she says, describing the little Beth who wouldn’t swim in deep water, didn’t climb trees, wouldn’t play on the schoolyard jungle gym and was too scared to go down the big slide at the park. “One winter I tried to teach you to ice skate backwards, You wouldn’t even try,” she said. “And now look at you.”

Jenny told the reporter I was always funny in high school. That means my personality didn’t change. But Bev says I’m fearless now, so maybe my personality did change when I lost my sight.

I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder.