PEOPLE MAGAZINE: TikToker Paul Shares the Reality of Living with Blindness — and Why Fake Service Dog Vests Are So Dangerous
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The legally blind TikTok star from 'Matthew and Paul' talks about living with blindness, and how fake "service dog" vests bought online can hurt the disabled.
- Paul — from the TikTok duo 'Matthew and Paul' — was just eight years old when he knew something was wrong with his vision
- He went viral in April after sharing that he was denied access to a restaurant by a staffer who didn’t believe that his dog, Mr. Maple, was a guide dog — part of a disturbing trend being fueled by fake “support dog” vests purchased online
- He's hoping to "educate everybody to understand that the spectrum of disabilities is far outside of what most people assume"
TikToker Paul — from the wildly popular duo Matthew and Paul — remembers the exact moment he knew something was wrong with his eyes.
“I was on a camping trip when I was a kid in eastern Washington,” he says, adding that he was around eight at the time. “Everybody was pointing out constellations in the sky and I looked up and I just couldn't see anything. And my brother was pointing out the Big Dipper and I was feeling the FOMO, so in my own frustration, pretended I could see.”
He tells PEOPLE that it wasn’t until he was 16, and trying to learn to drive, that “we knew something was definitely very wrong with my eyes.”
The diagnosis: retinitis pigmentosa which, according to the National Eye Institute, causes the “cells in the retina [to] break down slowly over time, causing vision loss.”