TikToker Paul On Being Legally Blind and Why Fake Service Dogs Are Dangerous [Video]

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.”

Now the …