Realize that when a person loses their vision, especially if it occurs at a young age, the brain will gradually shift itself around to live without visual input and areas and pathways that would have been necessary for sight get repurposed. There was a man who, through a revolutionary stem cell treatment, regained his sight forty years after losing it when he was three and found that he couldn't recognize faces, had to walk with a cane because he couldn't immediately tell what was what, and, after adapting to skiing blind, couldn't do it anymore.
I almost want to say that your character is going to have to deal with something similar even though she's been blind half the amount of time as that aforementioned man because the human brain loses pliability starting around puberty. We don't know how long such a readjustment process could take until a person could function as a sighted one. Probably decades if she really perseveres, to be honest.
Also, what, other than 'fantasy', is the setting like, and what is it that she wanted to do? Blind people can adapt to doing damn near anything.
edited 3rd Jul '13 8:39:50 PM by CrystalGlacia
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
It's not modern day, it's kind of a mish mash of middle ages/renasance//enlightenment. They haven't developed things like braile or guide dogs yet. Blind people in her culture usally take the job of reading auras ( which takes a very skilled person to learn) due to the fact that not being sighted gives them the advantage of not having a person's external appearence distract them while reading. She didn't want to do this. When she is introduced into the narrative, it has been at least five decades (I don't have a time set exactly) after she gained sight, and very few characters realize her past blindness until she tells them. Would it make sense for her to retain things like being able to navigate well in a dark room and such?
So the backstory of one of my characters (which isn't revealed until much later after she is introduced) is that she was born blind in a Fantasy setting where people can Body Surf into different bodies (which isn't treated as morally wrong in the natrrative, because it doesn't hurt/steal from anyone, but does rend one to be The Ageless) and it's perfectly normal. She was born into a family that believed the body surfing was wrong and was raised to live with her disability. She had an oprotunity to have a life and career with her disability, but none of the possible options were ones she actually enjoyed. When she turned 18, she decided to persue body swapping into a sighted body, (which was HER OWN choice) her family disapproves and after she does Body Surf, she is literally disowned by her family. Her reaction to suddenly obtaining sight is treated realistically (she struggles a lot at first) but because her lifespan is greatly lengthened, she has much longer to get the hang of it.