SPEAKING OF COLOR BLINDNESS

It's not hard to choose a paint color. What's hard is painting a feeling.

Most people assume color is something we see. I don't. Color is something we feel first and see second.

One of the people who confirmed this was a color-blind man.

His wife hired me because their home wasn't working. The house was filled with beautiful things: bright artwork, warm woods, reds, oranges, yellows, and purples, black-and-white photography, strong patterns, strong contrast. Everywhere I looked, there was evidence of people who loved color.

Yet the walls were painted a creamy yellow-white that felt almost invisible. It wasn't offensive. It wasn't ugly. It wasn't wrong. It simply wasn't participating.

The color reminded me of an old tooth that had seen a lot of coffee in its lifetime.

What fascinated me was the disconnect. Here were two people who clearly loved color, yet the largest surface in their home felt detached from everything around it. The walls weren't part of the palette. They weren't helping all that beautiful baggage belong together.

So I changed the overall color to one of my soft greens, a green I crafted to move with the light. Sometimes gray. Sometimes tan. Sometimes green.

At the speed of light, the black felt calmer. The oak tasted like honey. The reds and purples bloomed like flowers. The yellows and oranges felt like sunlight.

Same room. Same belongings. Different world.

That one color made every other color become more itself.

A few days later, the husband called me.

“I should tell you something,” he said. “I'm color-blind.”

He couldn't see the wall color the way most people could. The missing cones in his eyes made certain colors unavailable to him.

“But I can feel the difference,” he said. “The house feels calmer.”

That conversation was a confirmation of my knowing that color is felt, then seen.

You may not be able to see the difference, but you can feel the difference.

His color blindness was real. There are times people are color-blind and don't know it, which makes each and every one of us a little color-blind at times.

Color is not simply visual.

The longer I worked with color, the more I realized that seeing isn't always the problem. Sometimes people can't see a color because they are physically color-blind. More often, they can't see a color because they have a mind not entirely their own.

Yes, there is such a thing as hysterical blindness, a real physical loss of vision that is not caused by eye or brain damage. Instead, severe stress or trauma triggers the loss of sight.

So can not wanting to lose an argument with your wife.

I once worked with a couple who were determined to make a yellow color work in their home. Unfortunately, their entry was painted mint green, even though they insisted it was sage green.

The distinction mattered because the yellow they wanted would turn that green blue, and blue next to their orange floors would create a turquoise relationship they would never enjoy.

“It's not mint green,” they kept telling me.

So I placed several greens next to each other and asked them to compare.

Their color was clearly mint.

Silence filled the room.

Then the wife looked at her husband and said, “I told you it was mint green when we first saw it. I knew it was mint green. I just didn't want it to be.”

The mistake had been so disappointing that she convinced herself she was seeing something else.

I understood. We've all done it.

We've all owned the lipstick that suddenly turned orange, the shirt that made our skin look sick, the colorful bedspread that somehow became gray, or the paint color that looked perfect in the store and completely different at home.

We tell ourselves we didn't see it.

But often we did.

We just didn't want to.

Color has a way of revealing the truth. It refuses to become what we wish it were. It only becomes more itself when placed in relationship with other colors.

That is why choosing color is rarely about a single color.

It is about companionship.

The six colors of the rainbow want to be in good company. When they are, we feel it. Even when we cannot explain it. Even when we cannot see it.

And sometimes, as a color-blind man once reminded me, we can feel the harmony long before we understand why.

Coloring is an act of belonging.

You are the palette.

Gretchen..  Send this to someone you know.  Author Note

It started with a bucket of paint. Color became my vehicle for self-actualization—not because I loved decorating, but because painting my own walls helped me feel at home. That changed how I felt about myself, my relationship with the world, and what I believed was possible. Color taught me changing a relationship (not people) by clearing the air, knowing together, and doing better can change the world.

See my color work at colorbaggage.com