I Was Once Blind, But the Thunder Returned My Vision

 

I used to think sight was a matter of eyes.
Mine worked fine — I could read the signs on the road, see the faces in a crowd, notice the wrinkles in my own reflection. But I was blind in a different way. I saw only myself.

I moved through life chasing my own goals, counting my own troubles, filling my days with lists and deadlines that had no room for anyone else’s pain. People’s stories passed me like scenery through a car window — there, but never truly seen.

I didn’t ask the neighbor why she stared too long at her shoes.
I didn’t notice the trembling of the old man’s hands at the bakery.
I didn’t hear the heavy pause in a friend’s “I’m fine.”

I was looking, but I wasn’t seeing.

---

The thunder came on a night I wasn’t expecting.
Not just in the sky — though that night, the heavens split open in flashes that turned the whole world white for a second at a time. This was a different kind of storm: a loss that cracked something inside me.

It hit suddenly. A job I thought was secure disappeared overnight. Bills piled like dark clouds. People I thought would stand beside me stepped back, avoiding the lightning of my bad luck.

The first clap of thunder rattled my chest. I remember standing at the window, watching rain lash against the glass, and realizing something strange: I could see people outside. Not just their shapes, but their faces, their exhaustion, their quiet battles to get home through the storm.

It was as if the lightning lit up not just the street, but also the corners of my mind I had ignored.

---

I began noticing everything.

The woman at the bus stop holding a grocery bag with two bruised apples — probably the only fruit she could afford that week.
The teenager with sleeves pulled over his hands even in the heat — hiding scars no one had asked about.
The delivery rider shivering under a thin plastic poncho, eyes darting to the sky as if daring the rain to get worse.

I saw them because, in my own thunder, I understood them. My pain had tuned my vision to a frequency I’d never noticed before.

One afternoon, I walked home in a downpour and saw a man struggling to push his broken bicycle up a flooded street. The old me would have passed by — maybe muttered “poor guy” and moved on. But I stopped. I took one side of the bike, he took the other, and together we carried it to a dry spot.

He smiled, and it wasn’t just gratitude — it was recognition. The kind you feel when someone else has been through their own storm.

---

That’s when I realized something that made my chest ache:
I had needed this thunder.
Not because it was pleasant — it wasn’t. It ripped away the comfort I had wrapped around myself like a heavy blanket. But it also tore down the walls that kept me from truly seeing the world.

There’s a strange grace in problems.
They strip you down to what’s real. They shake you awake. They make you notice the rain falling on other people’s roofs.

---

Now, when I hear thunder in the distance, I don’t tense like I used to. I pause. I remember the night the sky roared loud enough to return my vision.

I don’t want to go back to the blindness I once had.
Because life looks different when you see it fully — the joy and the pain, the laughter and the tears, your own struggles and everyone else’s. It’s overwhelming, yes, but it’s also beautiful.

To that storm — to that deafening, drenching, world-splitting thunder — I say thank you.
You didn’t just bring the rain.
You brought my sight back.

And now, I will never close my eyes again.