How would one go about finding out if one had the sort of visual difficulties normally diagnosed in childhood? I fear a lot of my problems might well stem from visual difficulties that were never corrected because my childhood optometrists was, well, incompetent.
But we won’t go into that here, I will just talk about what has brought me to this conclusion and why I am asking such an odd question.
Looking back, I think all my life I have had visual difficulties that I could not describe to anyone and so were never detected or corrected. All my life, I have had trouble with certain things that other people found easy, and never knew why. I suppose I just thought I sucked, I was just inherently bad at things and it was somehow all my fault. But now I am not so sure.
I remember, as a kid, getting flack from my siblings for being bad at washing dishes. They would, logically enough, point to bits of food and such that I had missed and ask me how it was possible that I had not seen them when I washed the dishes. And I had no answer for them. It didn’t sound possible. It didn’t make any sense. And yet, I couldn’t see them until they were pointed out. I needed that extra visual help. And often I still didn’t see it and they would get even madder and that didn’t make it any better.
Eventually, I got glasses. And they helped. Without them, I am much blinder. But they didn’t really fix my problems. But I lacked the backbone or self-awareness to say anything. I suppose I thought that if I still wasn’t seeing properly, it was somehow my fault, and I had no right to complain.
All my life, I was made to feel as though I should just fade into the woodwork. More on that in some other entry in this blog series/memoir/confessional/emotional vomit trail. But I was an accident, unplanned, and when I came along, my parents already had three kids. the youngest four years old, and the other three were already a sort of unit, and well…. I never fit in. There was them, and there was me. They had their lives, their friends, their school, and I had mine. And my parents were always busy and tired. So it was just easier for everyone if I just shut up, never complained, never asked for anything, and more or less tried to make it as much like they had only three kids as possible.
I wish I was exaggerating. It took me many years and much thought to realize that was the deal, that was my role, growing up. I was to do what I was told, stay where I was put, and never attract attention to myself. Those are the exact words my father used. Don’t attract attention to yourself.
So sure, my new glasses were ridiculously overpowered and I still couldn’t see the blackboard from the back of the room. But my last name starts with B and that meant I got to be at the front of the class most of the time, and I learned faster from the book anyhow…. and even if I had realized that something had gone terribly wrong, I still would not have had the nerve to complain about it or even bring it up. Every time I tried that, my parents reacted like I had sprung a horrible surprise on them and more or less verbally and emotionally punished me for saying anything.
Everything is a surprise when you are not paying attention.
So looking back, I have had this visual problem my whole life. A whole lot of why I am so clumsy and awkward and bad with my hands is because to me, nothing stays still. The edges of things are always moving. It took a long time to realize not everyone sees the world through a subtle fog like I do. I think I have gotten as far as I have in life simply by learning to compensate for it, and to compulsive hide it in much the way an illiterate person learns to hide their problem.
And what really bothers me is one particular aspect of it : I am slow to learn to recognize faces. Presumably I have been that way since birth. And I know from my readings in psychology that babies that are slow to recognize faces often do not bond properly with their caregivers and this causes problems with them for the rest of their lives.
Sounds chillingly plausible. I won’t even get into talking about my mother.
If all this is true, I am not sure what I can do. Is it even possible to treat a problem that you have had your entire life and you are thirty seven? I doubt I even qualify as legally visually impaired. I don’t know if better glasses could help, or what.
And I don’t know if I know how to stop doing all the little things which I automatically do to compensate for my visual problems, and thus, end up hiding them from diagnosis.
Plus, because of my childhood, I have a terribly strong urge to tell authority figures that everything is fine. And doctors are authority figures.
I just don’t know what to do.
