Legally Blind with Perfect Vision
I’m writing this blog to share a part of my journey that has been particularly frustrating, discouraging and even sometimes a source of great insecurity for me.
I was born legally blind in my left eye. At an early age my parents noticed that I had a lazy eye that turned inward and I was diagnosed with Myopia and declared legally blind in my left eye. When I was 2 years old I had a couple of surgeries to fix the lazy eye and tried eye therapy like patching. However, my brain stopped receiving signals from my left eye and my doctors have always told me to accept that my vision will never improve and surgery is not an option.
Having poor vision has always been an annoying obstacle. I don’t have depth perception in many cases like trying to catch a ball. I was proudly picked last in gym class and had to sit at the front of my classes so that I could see the board. Neither of these things have been a huge deal or hit to my ego.
As I have gotten older and have established myself in the arts and as a stylist, my vision is playing a more crucial role in my life. I often feel I have to overcompensate for my vision when working on set and fear that I can’t see all of the details I need to catch. The surgeries I’d had to fix my lazy eye have lost their power and my eye has started to drift. I’ve noticed it gets worse on days when I’m using my eyes to focus in on details like crocheting or editing photos…which is basically every day.
My right eye can see fairly well with glasses or contacts and carries the weight of both of my eyes. I can drive, edit photos and crochet for hours a day so obviously I’m not being too held back by poor vision. I have asked a few surgeons if lasik eye surgery would be an option to improve the vision in my right eye but no one will touch it for fear of damaging my good eye.
Crocheting with my good eye patched #visiontherapy
It is often said that when someone lacks in one of their senses another sense will enhance. I feel that is the case with my hands. Sometimes I play a game while crocheting and see how long I can stitch a lace pattern without looking and fully rely on that I call “the eyes of my fingers.” I play this game for fun but also for fear that one day my vision will get worse and I will not be able to see all the details I need to be able to do my work. I fear that one day I will have to rely only on my hands so I try to get to know the shapes of the stitches so intimately that I don’t need to see them to know what they are or how they play a role in the bigger picture of a piece.
I firmly believe that I am fearfully ad wonderfully made with intention and that I would not have been given so much visual gifting in combination with poor eyesight for no reason. I like to think that maybe my unique eyesight has allowed me to see the world in a different way and possibly contributes to the ways I process texture and dimension.
When my eye doctor says things like “poor vision” or “impaired vision” I have to laugh because I know that I have amazing vision, I just have impaired eyesight. My vision in a spiritual or conceptual sense is one of my most heightened senses. I know this because I often bring my visions to life.