It was when I could no longer read street signs that I started to panic.

I’d been navigating the city for years with deteriorating sight, relying mostly on the memory of having walked the streets of N.Y.C. for more than two decades.

I have uncanny recall when it comes to blocks. Give me a block, I’ll tell you what’s on it. Thirty-third Street between Third and Lex? The Second Avenue Deli, which used to be on 2nd Avenue and 10th Street. There’s a nail place to the left, which used to be a bakery, and a threading salon on the right. It’s my one party trick.

When you can’t see, you find ways to survive. You count streets. (It’s four blocks between Jane Street and West 11th.) You learn the best exit to get off the subway to bring you to the correct corner, and which side of the street has odd numbers.

You learn the flow of traffic: Sixth, Eighth and Tenth Avenues go uptown. You always leave early because you’ll probably get lost.

I heard someone boast at a dinner party once, “I could get around this city with my eyes closed.”

I just sat and said nothing. Because no, they couldn’t actually do it with their eyes closed. And why would you, if you could just open your stupidly perfect eyes?

When I was 7, I learned I had uveitis, an inflammatory disease of the eye. What began as a painful sensitivity to light and floaters in my vision quickly progressed to blindness. Mercifully, throughout my childhood, I’d lose vision in only one eye at a time.

The vision would be miraculously restored with surgery, only to be lost again. It was a cycle of despair and elation.

By my midteens, the disease ceased as mysteriously as it had begun. The doctors had saved me from total blindness. But the secondary damage had been done. I had developed cataracts as a teenager, and the surgery to remove them failed.

The vision loss was now irreversible. I was devastated. My doctor advised me to wear glasses, because now I had only one good eye. I bought glasses and shortly after moved to New York. It had always been my dream to be an actress here, and bad vision wasn’t going to stop me.

That was nearly 20 years ago. I had a decent string of roles Off Broadway, and I could say I lived the dream. But as I recently stood at the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, I realized I could no longer read the signs. Was I at 43rd or 45th Street?

Squinting, I tried the flow-of-traffic trick, but I’d gotten turned around. Was I on Fifth, which goes down, or Sixth Avenue, which goes up? Everything around me was an increasingly panicked blur.

The morning rush of Midtown swirled around me as I tried to get my bearings. In that moment of disorientation and anxiety, power-walking New Yorkers bumping into me from what felt like all sides, I took a picture of the street sign with my phone and blew it up. I still couldn’t tell where I was.

You are vulnerable when you can’t see. I’m ashamed to admit that I — of all people — could never bear watching a blind person feel her way down the sidewalk in New York City. Now I was that person.

No amount of quick thinking could reverse the truth. My good eye had gone bad. I had one last hope that I dreaded: another cataract surgery.

It’s a peculiar thing to be able to re-experience a childhood trauma as an adult. The terror is the same. The growing sense of claustrophobia is just the same. But now, I had nothing left to lose. I couldn’t see, and an unsuccessful surgery would mean only that I would continue not to see.

When I entered the operating room, I had 20/200 vision, which meant I saw the world through frosted glass. a blur of shapes and colors. I could no longer read or fill out the medical release forms. I was blind.

When I came to, my husband was there. I drowsily took him in. He was grayer than I remembered. He had aged as I had lost even more sight over the last few years. Same kind, worried face. And then it came at me all at once. I could see him. I could see the recovery room. I could see everything. I burst into tears.

I continued to cry intermittently for the next couple of weeks. I took in Central Park from my terrace. I could see individual leaves rustle in the wind. Tears. I looked down at my dining room carpet, it was so dirty. I burst into tears.

I walked across the park one rainy afternoon, and I could see individual raindrops hitting the puddles. I walked down Broadway, smiling at all the strangers’ amazingly diverse and expressive faces, the grimaces, the smiles. I probably looked insane. I didn’t care. I was a living, breathing, seeing miracle.

Never forget how this feels, I repeated over and over to myself.

I went to museums: The Biennial at the Whitney, the costume exhibit at the Met. I went to a friend’s show at Town Hall.

I read street signs with wild abandon. Amsterdam Avenue! East 57th Street! Central Park West! You know — things seeing people do. Life is so easy with vision, I thought. I can do anything.

I realized what I’d been given back, even beyond my literal vision: a radical amazement of simple things. Overwhelming gratitude for a thing so easily taken for granted.

Central Park was no longer a flat green, it was a multitude of textured greens. The cherry blossoms on Riverside Drive were no longer a pink blur, but a delicate, speckled grouping of blossoms. What a gift I was given, to see this great city again, anew and fresh. I have one good eye, and that’s more than enough.

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