I was 12 years old when I found out that “my world” is not “THE world.” I was sitting in my seventh grade health class when my teacher pulled out a flip chart with a set of colored dots on each slide. The first one had a number 75 in red dots, surrounded by green dots. He asked us all “What number do you see?” We all said “75!” He then went to the next slide and asked the same question. There was no number on that slide, just a set of colored dots. When I replied, “There is no number” to his question everyone stared at me.

In that moment, I found out that I am colorblind. I’m not the only one, of course, it is relatively common in men (8 percent) though rarer in women (0.6 percent). It was a strange moment with all my classmates clamoring to ask me, “What color is this?” That is still the most common question asked of me when people find out that I am colorblind. While it was disturbing to find out that I couldn’t see colors that other people see, it also explained a lot.

When I was a boy we had what felt like an entire acre of raspberry bushes. One of our chores in the summer was to pick raspberries. I remember finding it very difficult. My sister would often complain, “I don’t want to pick raspberries with Matt. You can go right behind him and he misses them all!” Which to be fair was true. I just couldn’t see them and had no idea how anyone else could. We also had a game we played on the lawn that had a red ball. I would lose sight of it and have to endure a sibling yelling, “It’s right there! Right by your foot! Right there! Come on!”

So finding out that I am deuteranope colorblind helped me make sense of the world better. I had always wondered why boxes with 128 crayons were better than 8. I figured everyone else used the labels like “sky blue” to decide which color to use. But it was more than that, I realized in that moment, and many since, that the way I saw the world was not the way the world is, but just the way that I happened to see it. And that has had a profound impact on my life.

To put this in perspective, let me explain just a little about color vision. Human beings have three different cone-shaped receptors in the retina that respond to different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. We call the range of electromagnetic radiation that humans usually see “light” simply because it is the range that we can see with our particular receptors. While most human beings have three active cones, I have just two.

But while normal color vision for humans involves three cones, there are animals that have more than a dozen cones. There are also animals that see further into the infrared and/or ultraviolet ranges than we do, so “light” to them is broader than it is for us. So to those creatures, the mantis shrimp, for example, has 16 cones, we are hopelessly colorblind. That fact just makes me feel better.

So what is real and what exactly is color vision? Well, it shows that we are all bound up in our own particular interpretation of the world, based on our species, our perceptive abilities and even our culture. There is interesting research being done now by cultural psychologists showing that each culture has a particular way of organizing, naming and seeing colors. They see colors that we cannot and vice versa.

Last night I was sitting with my youngest daughter, reading through my journals from when I lived in a tribal are of Namibia, Africa, in my mid-20s. I had that realization then that my world is not THE world. I realized that many of the things I thought were important in my life in America were completely useless living in the Kalahari bush. Maybe being colorblind had prepared me to understand that truth.

What does all this mean? It means that we should be more careful when judging others who see the world in a different way. We should be careful to not mistake the way we see the world for the way the world actually is. There is no objective, privileged position by which to “see.” This can lead us to be more humble and tentative about our own particular worldview. And hopefully it leads us to be more thoughtful and compassionate toward others who “see” a different world than we do. That is what I have learned from being colorblind.

Matthew Whoolery holds a doctorate in psychology and is an instructor at Brigham Young University-Idaho. He can be reached by email at drwhoolery@gmail.com.