A 30-year-old woman from North Carolina, United
States, who has been obsessed with the idea of being blind right from
childhood, had finally fulfilled that long held desire by
deliberately damaging her eyesight.
“My mother would find me walking in the halls at
night, when I was three or four years old,” she said. “By the
time I was six, I remember that thinking about being blind made me
feel comfortable.”
Shuping spent hours staring at the sun as a child,
hoping it would damage her eyes and by the time she was a teenager,
she started moving around in thick black sunglasses. At 18, she got
her first cane and became fully fluent in braille by the time she
eventually clocked 20.
“I was blind-swimming, which is pretending to be
blind, but the idea kept coming up in my head and by the time I was
21 it was a non-stop alarm that was going off,” she said.
In 2006, the 30-year-old found a psychologist
willing to help her become blind. He put numbing eye drops followed
by drops of drain cleaner in each of her eyes. The pain was
excruciating, but the thought of going blind kept her happy.
“My eyes were screaming and I had some drain
cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin,” she said. “But all
I could think was ‘I am going blind, it is going to be okay.’”
Shuping was then rushed to the hospital where medics
tried everything to restore her vision. “When I woke up the
following day I was joyful, until I turned on to my back and opened
my eyes – I was so enraged when I saw the TV screen,” she said.
But in less than six months after that period, her
eyesight slowly diminished to nothing. When her family members came
to know what she had done, they disowned her. But she has received
support from her ex-fiancé, Mike, who is naturally blind. Shuping is
now studying for a degree in education and says she has no regrets
for what she did.
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