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My Biggest Insecurity: My Lazy Eye

Background

I was born with hardly any vision in my left eye, leaving me practically half blind.  The medical term is “amblyopia” but basically, I have a lazy eye.  While some people’s lazy eye drifts inward, mine drifts outward.

When I was an infant, I had to wear a contact lense in my left eye and an eye patch over my right eye. This was supposed to force me to use my left eye so that the brain would make connections to it and I wouldn’t completely lose sight in that eye.  My mother told me it was a struggle to get the contact in and that I used to try to rip the patch off all the time.

When I was a toddler I had surgery on my left eye to try to correct the muscles.  I was too young to remember any of it, though.

Growing up and even now, I am supposed to (and do most of the time) wear either glasses or protective lenses all the time, mostly to protect my right eye.  If something were to happen to it I would pretty much be blind.

Affect on my Life

My left eye is one of my biggest insecurities.  I strongly dislike having photos taken of myself due to my eye.  To me, when I look at a photo of myself, it appears as if I am not looking at the camera, even though I am.  Instead, it looks like I am looking somewhere off into the distance.  I make YouTube videos, and even in those, it looks like I’m not looking at the camera even though I am.

Special pictures, such as school or graduation photos, of myself I feel are “ruined” due to my eye condition.

I’ve received countless comments from people online who point out my eye.  Their comments will say something like “What is he looking at?” or “Where is he looking?”.  While those comments aren’t that bad, I have in fact been made fun of because of it. 

I run into this problem with people in person as well.  I remember multiple occasions where I was looking at someone, talking to them and they looked at me for a second, then looked behind them as if I was looking at someone else instead of them.

I’ve been told by a few eye doctors that there is nothing that can be done to fix the vision in my left eye.  While I don’t necessarily care about the vision anymore because I’ve lived without it my whole life, I wish there was some sort of surgery that could be done (again) to at least straighten my eye so that people and myself can’t tell that I have a lazy eye.

Conclusion

This is something that is always on my mind.  I figured I’d share it in case you see a video or picture of me and wonder what I’m looking at, or maybe this is something you struggle with, too.  I feel like we all have something we are born with or developed later in life that we struggle with.  The most important thing is if you notice something like that in someone, please do not call attention to it, because they more than likely already feel extremely self conscious about it.

– Therell