Guess what song I am listening to right now?

Another day, and here I am under slight time pressure once more because I ended up sleeping more than I thought I would, and getting that heavy sleep that makes me feel crappy, and eating my supper like three hours later than usual, and blah blah blah.

So I only have 2 hours in which to write today’s allotment. It normally takes me less than that, but still, normally I have a larger margin for error, and I am someone who needs as much margin for error as he can get at the best of times.

Because that’s the thing. I have never been good at precision, except when it comes to things that take place entirely in the realm of thought, like philosophy or language. Or comedy.

But when it comes to this whole reality gig, I have always had serious accuracy and precision issues. It probably all stems from my poor eyesight. Even with the glasses on, in many ways I am still stumbling about and taking my best guess at exactly how things work and where they are.

In fact, honestly, I think in a lot of ways, I am just using skills I learn to compensate for lack of precision vision, rather than having fully corrected vision myself.

I have been noticing this in particular when I watch movies. Often, being able to recognize who is who in a movie is rather key to understanding what the hell is going on. But I take a long time to learn to recognize faces, something which worries me on more than one level. And so in movies, I am often left frantically deducing who is who by external factors, like what they are wearing, or what makes sense given the dialogue or the plot at the moment.

This is also the case when the action is going too fast for me to recognize what the heck is going on. Many movies have lost me by doing that, and then I have to use those same powers of deduction based on the facts in order to catch up to the plot once more.

Presumably, I do an awful lot of that basic deduction and analysis all the time, without even knowing it. That is how I have been able to compensate for the lower amount of visual information I get from my real senses and how I manage to more or less function in the world.

But that kind of extrapolation is imperfect, to say the least. You can come up with a functional approximate of what is going on, but you are going to have a lot of errors and you are going to have to keep your conclusions quite modest in order to compensate for that.

So a person like me can muddle through reality and mostly function, at a low level, as though he has normal type eyesight as long as he is careful. But once you get into anything which requires a more precise view of the world, someone like me is up that proverbial dung stream without a propeller.

And what makes that especially bad is that you can’t explain to people why you can’t do normal things that normal people can do, because you are not even aware of this extrapolation yourself. It happens on a pre-conscious level, a visual processing level, and so it barely intrudes into your conscious mind at all. It is a skill you learned as a child, before you ever had glasses, and you have been doing it your whole life without knowing it.

So you can’t explain to people why you find physical things so damned hard. How even with the glasses, nothing as a smooth outline. When I look at the edges of things, they are always fuzzy and wavering. I have developed the instinct, in fact, to dart my eyes around, taking samples of my environment and deducing from there, instead of looking in one place and taking it all in.

Looking at something from one view for a long time does not help. It just reminds me too strongly of how my eyes don’t work that well and what a fog I perpetually live in. I have to keep my eyes moving if I want to get by, taking little snapshots before the fog comes in full blast, and deducing the rest.

Under that light, it is no wonder what I believe so strongly in seeing things from many perspectives in order to get the full picture, and why I find single viewpoints so limiting. I have been looking at things from different perspectives to get the whole picture all of my life.

I wish there was some way I could prove all this, prove that I am somewhat visually impaired and that therefore there are some things I just can’t do. If I had some kind of proof, like a certificate from an organization for the visually impaired, that I could show people and say “Here, see? My eyes do not work right, that’s why I cannot do X. It is not just that I am a klutz and a spaz. I am visually disabled. ”

All thought my childhood, my siblings would be trying to get me to do things, and I would not be able to do them at all, and they would want to know why, and I just could not explain it to them.

So all my life, I have felt like the world was holding me to a standard, a quite simple one really, that I nevertheless could not achieve.

No wonder I have felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with me my entire life. There was! And there still is.

I should talk with my therapist about this. It is a deep, sore issue and one that likely requires more examination than I can do by myself.

For now, I will just lay me down in bed, and give these tired eyes of mine a rest.