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On a recent trip to New York City, Sassy Wyatt stood atop the Empire State Building, the wind in her hair, soaking up the experience.
“I heard a helicopter flying by, I heard the sirens, I heard the birds, I heard people around me. I could smell the kind of the grittiness of the air – where it’s part clean air and part dusty is the only way I can explain it. And then feeling the kind of rattling – that’s what it felt like, the rattling – of the building underneath my feet,” Wyatt tells CNN Travel. “I realized how high up I was.”
Wyatt, who is now in her early thirties, lost her sight completely about a decade ago. The recent trip to New York was her second time in the city. She also visited before she became blind, back when she was 16.
As she stood at the top of the Empire State Building, Wyatt reflected on the difference between these two trips.
“I couldn’t really tell the enormity and the vastness of where I was in retrospect to when I was sighted, at 16 years old,” says Wyatt. “I couldn’t tell the scale of the size of the buildings and the vast expanse of what I could see beyond, and how everything got tinier and tinier and tinier, the further away it was. Of course I couldn’t experience that in the same way that a sighted person can.”
But Wyatt felt like she had a greater appreciation of the “essence” of New York City this time round, as she focused on absorbing the city with her other four senses.
Plus, standing next to Wyatt on her 102nd floor was her best friend, who described the view of the sea of skyscrapers “in her words, through her eyes.”
And as she stood there, Wyatt had an acute sense of the spirit, the atmosphere of New York. The city felt “fun and exciting and overwhelming.”
The experience brought “the city to life to me, in a different way,” says Wyatt.
And for Wyatt, this experience epitomizes why she loves traveling – because, not despite of, the fact she’s lost her sight.
“I really do believe that my blindness has actually opened up the world to help me see it better,” Wyatt says.
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