“I’m someone who likes to push against my fears and challenges. You make memories by taking risks, and that’s something I want to continue doing.”
When you first meet Gabriel Goh, his confident posture and friendly disposition give you no indication of his ailments. And that’s what it was like for me. After making small talk with the 25-year-old engineering student at an event, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It wasn’t until we had a couple of drinks that he very candidly opened up and told me he was blind. Taken aback, I looked at him and wondered for a moment if I was being pranked. He had no cane, no guide dog, and seemed to be navigating the bar just fine. Oh, and that was after I found out he does photography work while studying, which made me wonder how that affected his career. A blind photographer in Singapore? I must have misheard something.
Having caught the confusion on my face, he laughed. “No, no. I’m blind in one eye,” he explained. With his group of friends affirming this, I let out an “ooooh” of clarity. That’s when confusion turned into inquisitiveness. How often do you meet someone who’s half blind in Singapore? Fuelled by my curiosity, Gabriel kindly humoured me and answered all my questions.
An innocent accident
The first thing I wanted to know was how it happened. Was it caused by an autoimmune condition? Was he born with this? Did his vision slowly deteriorate? However, the answer turned out to be more ordinary than I expected. Sometime in his primary school years when he was 10, Gabriel recalls, he spent time with his brother playing with Beyblades – a line of spinning-top toys. I expressed some excitement because I remembered playing with these toys during my childhood. But it also came with the grim memory of the toy’s sharp edges and metal pieces.
Gabriel describes how he reached down to grab something from under the table. However, as he moved, his brother ended up accidentally slashing his eye open while playing with the Beyblade. If you winced, don’t worry, I did too. There was no need for other details with a mental image like that. Gabriel says he didn’t think anything was wrong; he didn’t even feel any pain.
“You know how in Korean dramas, they look down and see blood dripping on the floor? That’s what that moment was like for me,” he describes, chalking it up to a state of shock.
By the time he arrived at the hospital and saw a doctor in the emergency room, they said his cornea was too torn to save. After getting eight stitches in his eye, Gabriel was warded and kept under observation. However, his stay was anything but comforting. He recalls it being lonely, with no one visiting him except his family.
“The only thing that kept me going was when my dad would bring me down to feed the turtles in the pond,” he says with bitter fondness.
A worsening outlook and an unhelpful cure
Time heals all wounds, but it didn’t seem to heal Gabriel’s. Instead, his sight seemed to worsen over time. The scar in his eye blocked most of his usable vision, and he ended up developing a cataract from the injury, which worsened with exposure to light. Salvation came in the form of a doctor who suggested surgery to replace the lens in his eye – a surgery he was told would improve his eyesight tenfold. Despite the price, Gabriel’s parents put together the money, believing they could put this whole incident behind them.
You’d think we’d end our story here, but unfortunately, things only went downhill. After a traumatising surgery where he was awake and conscious of everything (yes, everything), Gabriel felt a moment of short-lived relief. While his vision wasn’t cloudy anymore, he was now plagued by other complications that began to disorient him and led to greater fatigue, pushing him to get a second opinion. Skipping past the complicated physics of how the eye works, he explains that because his eye wasn’t a perfect sphere anymore, the additional surgery he went through only made things worse.
Of his desperate attempt to regain his eyesight, Gabriel laments his hasty decision. The pricey procedure only made a marginal improvement in his vision, and after speaking with the second doctor, he discovered more complications. Instead of just having his sight blocked by a scar, it’s now cloudy with the occasional glaring lens flare, similar to how glasses fog up after leaving a very cold bus.
“If she had been my consulting doctor to begin with, she wouldn’t have recommended the surgery,” he says, adding that there’s a possibility of the new lens falling off which will lead to permanent vision loss in his right eye.
The light at the end of the tunnel
(Pictured above: Gabriel’s photography Instagram account.)
After getting the grizzly lowdown, I ask Gabriel how he got through the accident. He chalks it up to his can-do attitude and willingness to take challenges, looking at things in a more positive light. “I believe that whatever the universe takes from you, it’ll return tenfold,” he explains, using our conversation as an example. “I mean, you wouldn’t have interviewed me if it wasn’t for my blindness,” he laughs.
He talks about how his injury affected his posting during National Service, where he ended up as an admin assistant. But here’s the plot twist – instead of staying in dreary Singapore, Gabriel was posted to Arizona for a year, an opportunity that wouldn’t have come to him if it weren’t for his affliction. Being in the US also led him to discover his love for photography, a passion that he’s delved into for several years.
“I want to document how I see the world so that I can show my children what I saw through my perspective,” he says. Gabriel describes this poetic way of preserving his sight as a form of comfort to himself. Being able to make full use of his eyes through photographs while he still has vision cements a multitude of memories that he can share with others.
But that in itself came with its challenges. A blind photographer in Singapore comes off as an oxymoron in any resume. There’s a worry about what impression clients might have of him, and whether they’ll believe he’s capable for the job. But Gabriel pushes through with pure grit and determination. He’s learned to work around his blindness and is wary of anything that might exacerbate his eye fatigue.
A bumpy road ahead
Even though he’s learned to live with it, coping with vision loss is still an up-and-down battle. He shares candidly with me about thoughts and shifts in his behaviour since losing part of his vision. For example, he’s plagued with paranoia and hyper-awareness of situations that may lead to a similar accident happening to his other eye – though people don’t often notice these little dangers. “Everyone says I still have my other eye to see. But the way I see it, it’s like being down to one lifeline,” he says.
He also reveals his late-night musings to me, reflecting on how his blindness might affect the rest of his life. “I’ve considered learning Braille. I’ve thought about how to design my house to help with my vision loss. I’ve even thought about when I get married and what it’d be like for my partner,” he shares. There’s an uncertainty that sits within him about his independence – whether he’ll sustain a job in engineering, and what happens when he grows old and vulnerable.
Despite these fears, Gabriel plans to continue living life to the fullest, risks and all. “Yes, it’s scary. But if I let it hold me back, I’m going to miss a lot that life has to offer,” he says.
Through the highs and the lows, he’s learned how to live with being blind in Singapore. Rather than perceiving the situation negatively, he now considers it part of his story. I’m refreshed by his charmingly realistic outlook on life. Being prepared for the worst-case scenario doesn’t mean you live in fear of it forever. It’s about living life in spite of it.
