023 Personal Perspectives on Vision Loss with Nik Kirkpatrick

In Episode 023 of inSight Out, host Matthew Reeves — a legally blind psychotherapist — sits down with Nik Kirkpatrick, a forty-year-old with Stargardt's disease who found the podcast through the Stargardt's subreddit. Nik offers one of the most candid and grounded personal perspectives the show has featured: no silver linings forced too soon, no tidy arc — just the real, uneven, sometimes funny experience of building a life around a diagnosis that shaped everything without defining him.

Nick was seventeen when he was diagnosed, but the years that followed were marked more by avoidance than acceptance. He didn't disclose at college, dropped out of classes he couldn't follow, and spent years in the restaurant industry — work that felt accessible but came with genuine physical risk. Economic hardship, social misunderstandings, and a misconception about his prognosis compounded an already difficult journey. He was in his thirties before he connected with a therapist who could actually help.

What makes this conversation stand out is the specificity. Nik talks about the cognitive work of navigating a restaurant floor using peripheral vision and basketball footwork. He describes the quiet indignity of a friend assuming he couldn't split a bill. He reflects on advising his newly diagnosed mother-in-law — 20/40 vision — that his vision was worse at seventeen than hers is now, and that he still carries trays of glasses across a restaurant floor without falling. He plays chess at the 65th percentile on chess.com by memorizing the half of the board he can't see.

Matthew and Nik also dig into the deeper psychological terrain: how vision loss intersects with identity, the danger of conflating what you can do with who you are, and why the most durable coping resource Nik found was a sense of self he'd built before the diagnosis — one rooted not in achievement, but in accountability.

Topics covered: Stargardt's disease personal experience, vision loss and identity, adjusting to progressive vision loss, low vision in the workplace, navigating restaurants with low vision, peripheral vision adaptation strategies, vision loss and mental health, therapy for disability adjustment, Stargardt's subreddit community, low vision and employment challenges, economic impact of vision loss, SSDI and blindness, disclosure of visual impairment at work, vision loss grief and acceptance, macular degeneration family support, living well with low vision, quality of life with vision impairment, play to your strengths disability advice

Contact Nik at nikkirkpatrick@gmail.com.

ABOUT THE PODCAST

inSight Out is your podcast home for living well with vision loss. Host Matthew Reeves (LPC CRC NCC) is a legally-blind psychotherapist and rehabilitation counselor specializing in helping people thrive while living with disability. Matthew is licensed in Georgia and is a nationally certified rehabilitation counselor.

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