Seeing Clearly: A memoir of vision loss, emotional blindness, and finding my true self
He thought he was losing his sight. Instead, he found his vision.
The day the world began to blur, Chris Monnette thought he was losing his eyesight. What he didn’t realize was that he was about to see everything that mattered for the first time.
At fifty-four, after emerging from one of the darkest periods of his life, Chris is diagnosed with neovascular macular degeneration—an incurable retinal disease that slowly erodes the fine detail of vision. As the world around him softens and sharp edges disappear, he’s forced to face what he’s avoided for decades.
Raised by a stoic father and trained as a Marine to equate emotion with weakness, Chris built a life defined by control and success. But vision loss leaves no room for pretense. In surrendering to what he cannot fix, he begins to see what he can change—his capacity for intimacy, compassion, and forgiveness.
Seeing Clearly is a deeply honest meditation on what it means to lose one kind of sight and gain another. There was a version of Chris before Seeing Clearly and one after. This book invites readers to walk beside him on the journey between them—a path from control to surrender, from fear to understanding, and from merely seeing to truly seeing clearly.
