Johnny Depp

Who is watching the trial? I have watched a huge chunk of it. I don’t have great Internet at home and I don’t have cable TV. So I am watching what I can, when I can. 

I saw a portion this week that was Johnny Depp talking about his left eye. He said most people’s eyes are spherical in shape. Depp said his left eye was not spherical but rather oblong. Because of this, he said his brain never learned to use his left eye. He said he is legally blind in his left eye. 

[Photo, courtesy of Vanity Fair. Shows Johnny Fox on the witness stand in the Fairfax County Circuit Court in Fairfax, Virginia. Johnny is wearing pink rimmed glasses with blue lenses that match the knot of his blue tie.]

I see him put on his light blue glasses. I know I have always closed my right eye so I don’t see double when I am reading. But when I type, I tend to shut my left eye. 

I guess I was expecting to see Depp shut his left eye when reading the computer monitor, but he doesn’t. I guess he just doesn’t see out of it. It’s fascinating to me how many different eye issues people have. We all do our own quirks with these vision and eye issues. I have trouble seeing out of my left eye, and I do the flickering eyesight, which overwhelms me with information and forces my brain to block out large portions of what I am taking in both visually and auditory.

He is an extraordinary actor. I have been a fan of his Mad Hatter character and his character in 21 Jump Street, and of course his Captain Jack Sparrow character for years. I wasn’t aware of all the other movies he was in, though. I have seen him in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He did a great job, but I wasn’t a fan of that version of the movie. I also wasn’t a fan of the Sweeney Todd, Demon of Seville movie. 

It’s an interesting thing, when your eyes don’t work like “everyone else’s.” It makes you look at the world differently, laugh at different kinds of humor, find creativity everywhere you look. 

Regarding the trial, and I am treading carefully here, I have learned that too many people are abusers, and too many people have been victims of abuse. I believe any gender can be abused, and I believe any gender can be the abuser. 

It breaks my heart to see a victim tell the truth, even if it means bringing out their own skeletons from their own closet, and to see the abuser sit there on the stand, lying and believing they are getting away with something. 

May true justice prevail. 

Seeing Double

My son’s and my vision therapists have a card in their office that has some vision issues on it. 

This is quite similar to how I see out of only my left eye. I have discerned that I see double out of my left eye only. It’s a thing. My vision therapist says it’s not a thing unless your cornea has been split in two. But - it’s truly how I see things. I haven’t spent time with my right eye to see how it sees. 

It takes effort and endurance to be able to look at something for a long time to see how I see it, and then to be able to figure it out in words. 

Anyway, I wish I could take photos of what I actually see. I can’t. But this shows what I see, in a way others can interpret.

My double vision is so similar to this - here’s how mine is different. (My right eye has a whole host of other issues, so this is really about my left eye.) 

I see the main, dark part. The text (shown here also, as the dark text.) Then I see below it and wider than it, the blurred words too. It’s slightly below and wider than the text of what I see. 

It’s exhausting and confusing and tiring and makes me need to take naps. I walk around all day, seeing this way. 

This is just ONE of my many many many vision issues. I have wanted to figure out how to create this graphic and couldn’t quite get to the place where I could create this using tools I already have. I am so glad the vision therapy office created this. It helps me share, and helps others learn that “not everyone sees the way I see.” 

Thought I would share. 

Tape on my glasses

When I was a little girl, I got a blue pair of Wonder Woman glasses. Because I was diagnosed with a "Lazy Eye," (one eye wandering, while the other eye stays focussed on what I am looking at) the eye doctor put tape on the outside of my glasses. This was supposed to draw my eye back in because it would be looking through blurry tape and not seeing clearly. I haven't had those kid glasses since the early 80s. So I re-created what I'm talking about on my brand new pair of glasses.

I walked around for years wearing scotch tape on my glasses. So many people asked me, "why do you have tape on your glasses?" "Did your glasses break?" I was horribly embarrassed by this. I would answer confidently that I had a lazy eye and it was supposed to help me see better.

I went to my new eye doctor, who in this blog I am going to refer to as Dr. Magic, for the first time 2 weeks ago. On my second visit, he asked me to look at him and tell him what I saw. I told him he was moving in a "U" shape. And I indicated that with my arm.

He said he was going to put tape on my glasses. I thought, "here we go again." I told him: "yes, I used to wear tape on my glasses when I was a little girl."

Dr. Magic asked me, "where was it?" I told him: "on the outside 1/2 of my glasses or so."

He nodded and proceeded to put tape on my glasses. When he was done, they looked like this. (I took this photo - I always set them on the table upside down. So, they are upside down.) They are sitting on top of one of my many notebooks. This is my own artwork as the cover of the notebook.

Well, he handed the glasses back to me with the tape barely on the inside of my eyes. "That's unusual," I thought.

I put the glasses on and I looked at him. He asked me "what changed?"

I looked at him for quite a while. Then I said, "you're not moving anymore!"

It was exciting and also a bit weird. I hadn't really noticed that every time I looked at something, it was always flickering back and forth and rocking in "U" shape.

This simple fix made my life go from a moving ship to stillness. Wow.

I hadn't gotten around to putting this tiny tape on my new pair of glasses. As I typed up this blog post, I went ahead and added it now to my brand new pair of 3D magic glasses. So - here they are. My brand new pair of glasses. With scotch tape on them. haha.

I had been typing this blog with one eye closed. But I just got the tape on these and now I can type with both eyes open. What a miracle a proper pair of glasses can be, even if they need a tad bit of scotch tape on them.