{"id":2449963,"date":"2019-10-16T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-17T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/news\/aspen-princess-perception-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder\/"},"modified":"2019-10-16T22:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-17T04:00:00","slug":"aspen-princess-perception-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/aspen-princess-perception-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder\/","title":{"rendered":"Aspen Princess: Perception is in the eye of the beholder"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cThe good news is you have 20\/20 vision,\u201d the eye doctor said after he\u2019d completed my exam.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen why can\u2019t I see anything?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause it\u2019s the way your brain processes what you see,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, you\u2019re saying it\u2019s me who\u2019s blurry?\u201d I replied.<\/p>\n

I was born with an eye condition called strabismus, which is essentially a \u201clazy eye.\u201d It\u2019s hereditary. My dad has the same condition and so does my cousin Roger. I had four surgical procedures by the time I was 6 years old to correct it. My right eye was so bad when I was a baby that I didn\u2019t use that eye at all. Weak muscles behind the eye cause the eye to cross, or drift and so I would suppress the vision in that eye and use the other one, which only made the condition worse.<\/p>\n

Back then, there was only one eye doctor who would operate on babies and he was located in Washington, D.C. I was in first grade when I had the last surgery, and for many years, I enjoyed eyes that looked like everyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t mean they functioned like everyone else. It wasn\u2019t until I took an introductory biology course in college when I discovered I had no depth perception.<\/p>\n

\u201cExcuse me, my textbook doesn\u2019t work,\u201d I said to my professor.<\/p>\n

We were studying the eye and the book had little graphics to demonstrate how depth perception works. The professor walked me to the window that overlooked the quad.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich tree is closer?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re next to each other,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

He looked a little startled. \u201cThat tree is about 15 feet closer,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

My dad, who has a medical degree and the same eye condition, was nonplussed by this discovery. \u201cNo, you don\u2019t have depth perception,\u201d he said, with an annoying degree of nonchalance. \u201cYou\u2019ve never had it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well! This explained a lot.<\/p>\n

It explained why I\u2019ve never been good at ball sports. Like the time I was warming up for a lacrosse game and got hit square in the face with the ball when trying to catch on my left side and broke my nose. Or why I\u2019ve never been able to pay golf or tennis, often swinging as hard as I can only to hear a loud \u201cwhoosh\u201d as I miss the ball altogether. Or why I was also hit square in the face by a volleyball when I tried to return a serve. And here, all this time I just thought I was a complete idiot.<\/p>\n

It explained how the ground always seemed to come up out of nowhere and flatten me every time I tried to catch air skiing and snowboarding or how, when I dropped into a wave, the flat bottom seemed to come up at me instead of the other way around. I couldn\u2019t decipher if it was 4 feet, 10 feet, or 2 feet. I might as well have been blindfolded.<\/p>\n

It explained why, when I was mountain biking on single track, it often felt like a series of images, like when a shutter on a camera lens opens and closes really fast, almost like a strobe light effect. No wonder I didn\u2019t want to ride too fast.<\/p>\n

It explained why every single set of binoculars I\u2019ve ever tried to use were broken. Try as I might, I\u2019d see nothing but black, unless I closed one eye. This is due to a lack of stereopsis, or the ability for my eyes to work together.<\/p>\n

It also explained why driving at night posed some unique challenges or why, when I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license and they make you look in that eye thing and I can only see images if I close one eye.<\/p>\n

\u201cOrange square, blue diamond, yellow circle,\u201d I\u2019d recited. The tester shook her head with alarm, almost like she had water in her ears.<\/p>\n

I looked up. \u201cOh! Hold on.\u201d I closed the other eye. \u201cI see the letters E, L, M and P.\u201d With the other eye closed, it was a completely different set of results.<\/p>\n

When I met Ryan, I asked him if he ever noticed my eyes were a bit crossed. \u201cOh, sure,\u201d he said in the way Minnesotans do. \u201cBut it\u2019s what makes you, you. I always thought it was cute.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not so sure everyone feels the same way. Once, a close friend of mine confessed that when I\u2019d applied for an editor job at her magazine, the woman in charge of hiring, a rigid British type, had said, \u201cBut she\u2019s cross-eyed,\u201d as if that somehow disqualified me.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always wonder what the world looks like through your eyes,\u201d my brother often says, especially when I\u2019m behind the wheel.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m heading to Denver later today to see the specialist in Colorado who performs corrective surgery on adults. As I\u2019ve aged, my eyes have gotten really bad. In some photos, especially selfies, I see both eyes crossing. This is not good.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s part of who you are,\u201d a friend said the other day, distressed that I felt the need to have surgery.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that this has always been part of my narrative. After all, \u201cBorn Cross Eyed\u201d would be a great title for my memoir or my first album, if I had any musical talent whatsoever, which I do not. It\u2019s true that it is part of who I am, and the people who love me find it endearing. It\u2019s also true that, like that first doctor said, this procedure does not guarantee I\u2019ll be able to see better, since the way I process vision can\u2019t necessarily be fixed.<\/p>\n

In some ways, blurry vision is what helps me to see the world in my own unique way and in some ways, lends itself to the perceptions I have as a writer \u2014 depth perception be damned.<\/p>\n

The Princess needs a beach vacation. Email your love to alisonmargo@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe good news is you have 20\/20 vision,\u201d the eye doctor said after he\u2019d completed my exam. \u201cThen why can\u2019t I see anything?\u201d I asked. \u201cBecause it\u2019s the way your brain processes what you see,\u201d he told me. \u201cSo, you\u2019re saying it\u2019s me who\u2019s blurry?\u201d I replied. I was born with an eye condition called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2449963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-19 14:15:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2449963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2449963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2449963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2449963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}