I’m gonna tell ya’ll a little story from my youth. When I was in the first or second grade, my parents were sent a note from my school teacher saying that when completing classwork, I stared at the papers extremely close to my face to enhance the size of the text. My teacher said there was something wrong with my eyes and my parents immediately took me to see the eye doctor.

I thought I saw things fine, I just thought I could see better with my face closer to the worksheets. I never had to sit close to the tv like my nana did when she would watch the ball game with her Brandy and Fresca, but then again and unknown to me at that time, she had macular degenerative of the eyes so she was essentially blind by the age of 75. My grades never suffered and I could see my Barbies with ease and the millions of dollies and dollhouses I had. I always thought of myself as the luckiest gal in the world.

So my parents took me to the eye doctor in the big city and they said after a simple eye exam and me crying because I couldn’t see the images or the letters or characters even with my right eye, that I had amblyopia. Modern day talk was that I had a lazy eye in my right eye. I was told that as my eye was in that moment, it would prohibit me from driving a car, from being a CDL driver, or a pilot. Doors were shut before I could even recognize there even being doors in my line of sight (literally and metaphorically.) My good eye, my left eye was 20/20 otherwise known as perfect. Which is why I could still images on the tv or big items like toys and Barbies. But the extra strain on my good eye meant that I was bound to always need some type of eyewear to not only see out of the bad eye as much as humanly possible and to reduce stress and strain on the good eye.

I never really realized the struggles I would face with this illness I was born with until much later when it came to getting a driver’s license and working as a government employee for the Navy. Essentially a lazy eye is the nerve endings that connect the eyeball to the brain don’t send proper sensations so the picture I saw out of my eye was a vague perception of color and blurriness. With only my right eye, I can’t make out the letter ‘E’ on the eye chart even though at 7 years old I knew my alphabet. All I could tell was a beige background and a dark blob of pigment. Logically with my good eye, I knew what the letter was supposed to be but my eyeball nerves couldn’t decipher it.

Many people don’t know this but back in 2004-2005 when this all went down, optometry production wasn’t advanced like it is today. My prescription was so large to correct my lazy eye that they didn’t make glasses thick enough anymore. Either that or they were worried about me being bullied in school for my thick one lens glasses. So at 7 years old, I was given my first and last pair of contacts. I remember vividly my mother laying me down on the couch and placing the one contact in my eye. I would scream and cry bloody murder because it was so uncomfortable and I detested it with a passion.

I remember going to school and once it was after attendance and the Pledge of Allegiance, I would ask for the bathroom pass and I would rip out the contact and flush my eye with the solution so I would look like I had the contact still in. I don’t recall if I changed my head to worksheet ratio proportion. But I remember when my mom would look in my backpack she would find the contact in its case and she would be furious that I wasn’t acting like an adult and taking my disability seriously. (my words not hers). She would fight me to put them back in for the other torture chamber device: the eye patch.

After school and on the weekends, anytime I was doing something with long vision distance, I had to use an eye patch on my good eye to force me to train the bad eye how to use the nerves to see. I detested this almost more than the contacts themselves because I couldn’t see anything like tv or toys or nothing. But the next summer I moved to where I live now which meant a new eye doctor. They said that even though I was not patching enough to fix the lazy eye, I could upgrade to a pair of wired rimmed glasses and that changed my world. My nana hand sewed an eye patch made of light pink felt that slipped over the frames of the glasses so I could wear the eyepatch and glasses simultaneously. For those of you who don’t know, vision can actually improve in your youth if you do proper training up to the age of 12. After that, the eyes stop growing /evolving and start degenerating. So now at 9, I only had three years to patch my eye to improve it before it deteriorates.

I eyepatched everyday the summer before 5th grade and it improved my vision in my right eye enough to be able to drive a car once I turned 16. That was the goal and my eyesight hasn’t changed improved or deteriorated in sixteen years. The DOL didn’t like me because I couldn’t see anything during the vision test to get my license. At 19, the Shipyard didn’t like me because I was too much of a liability if something happened with my right eye or couldn’t see something and become a trip hazard. I had to file medical exception forms; that I could do the job and my disability does not affect me. Nobody knew outright that my naval career wouldn’t last two years on paper and no one knew I would get into multiple wrecks and get tickets involving my eye sight.

I guess the tl;dr version of this all is or the long winded version is that I was told no from the start. I was told I would never own a pair of eye glasses because my eye sight was too bad. But I proved them wrong. I feel like when I was a kid, wearing contacts and glasses was the end of the world but if you breathe for two seconds and realize my struggles even with bipolar disorder and all my other ailments isn’t nearly as bad as the wars that are going on world wide. I have a home, I have a car, I am not being ripped of my rights, I have the right to jury trial, I am not stuck in jail even thought I fucking very well could be if I don’t do this sober thing right.

Where I am is not accidental. It is a direct reflection of my own autonomy and God picking up the pieces of the wreckage I’ve created and making something beautiful yet again. People are dying every moment as I type this blog post and yet I have the privilege to do school, to find work that is rewarding to me, to go to treatment, to be myself.

I like to envision my issues from a bird’s eye view. Because when you’re at the height of an airplane in the sky, things look so small and meaningless from out the window and looking down. But when you’re on the ground level in a big city looking up? Your problems look like they surmount the tallest building in your city. Life is too short to be miserable. Don’t sweat what everyone else views as small. Nothing is the end of the world…. at least not yet. Enjoy the little things and even the big things because if you have air in your lungs it means you’re alive to feel all of the feelings of a lifetime and if you’re bipolar like me; that is a lot of feelings.

Go hard and much love,

Dani