Looking Through Eyes with Astigmatism

Over the weekend I wrote a draft of a blog article about what astigmatism is and how it affects my view of the world. What a coincidence that this haiku was the first thing that came up in my e-mail:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/9150711/windows_to_the_soul_haiku.html

What is astigmatism? As you probably already know, in order to focus on things at different distances, tiny involuntary muscles actually change the shape of our eyeballs. For normal eyes, this change takes hardly enough time to blink and may never be felt or noticed. For eyes with astigmatism, the change still takes place in a few seconds, but it takes long enough to be noticeable.

I've been very lucky. Most people my age are either nearsighted or farsighted by now, and wear glasses. I've never had to wear glasses, and still see clearly at any distance...but, the older I get, the longer it takes for my eyes to change their focus. I thought of eleven small differences this has made in my life. Since I started writing for Associated Content when they were paying ten dollars for Top Ten Lists, these eleven differences quickly turned into a list of ten.

Note that no two cases of astigmatism are exactly alike. Although there's some overlap, the description of how astigmatism affects me at age 47 differs from the description of how astigmatism affected my mother when she was 47, how astigmatism affected my niece when she was 7, or how astigmatism affect me when I was 7. Some people experience astigmatism as a real disability; some hardly know they have it.

1. I hate to drive. Even in situations where driving seems like a good Green thing to do, it tires my eyes.

2. Although I'm in favor of preserving or even expanding our constitutional rights, I personally don't find much use for firearms. I have to close one eye to hit a foot-high target with a shotgun.

3. I literally can't keep my eye on the ball, or on anything else that's thrown to me. If I don't try to focus on the object, I may be able to catch it by guessing where it's going. If I'm swinging a racket or bat, I can usually hit the ball before everything goes out of focus. But if I try to watch a ball, or a coin or a handkerchief, that's thrown to me, everything will blur and I won't have a chance of catching it.

4. It's possible to have astigmatism and also have nearsightedness or farsightedness. I dread reaching that stage in life, because ordinary reading glasses or safety goggles do not work for me. They make everything a blur, and they give me headaches. Glasses that work for people with astigmatism have to be specially made, and even then they seem to take a lot of getting used to.

5. Not being as badly affected as James Thurber, I have managed to adjust a microscope so that I could see and draw something other than the reflection of my own eye (although that's always the easiest thing for me to see through a microscope). However, I've never had a classmate who could see anything through the setting that worked for me.

6. I enjoy bird watching, but I don't even try to spot the identifying marks of little brown tree-dwelling birds.

7. If I look up from reading a book or using a computer when someone approaches, I can usually tell the race and gender of the person...but I could be mistaken. I've been focussed on something close up, so things at a normal conversational distance are a blur. To people who interrupt me at the computer center I probably seem extremely nearsighted. By the same token, to people who approach me when I'm walking (and scanning the horizon), I probably seem extremely farsighted; they're blurs too.

8. During a conversation, as my eyes adjust to focus on the other person's face, I do begin to see facial features and facial expressions clearly. However, faces don't "say" much to me. During the first glance in your direction I probably didn't see your eyes at all. If we continue talking I'll get a good clear picture of your face and register the fact that you have two eyes, and they're both the same size...but what communicates your feelings to me is your voice. If my eyes seem to be doing something special, to you, they're probably reacting to some sort of irritation, since I inherited my astigmatism from my mother and neither of us depends on visual cues to communicate. And if you're trying to send some sort of message with your eyes, forget it; I'll probably assume that you're reacting to some sort of irritation too. I do look at people during a face-to-face conversation, as a courtesy, but if anything I communicate better on the phone.

9. Movement, even within the same general range of distance, is tiring for me to watch. I've learned the alphabet and some words in sign language, but when I signed up for a sign language course, after one hour I felt physically exhausted...and I dropped the class.

10. I probably appear to make eye contact more often than I do. I've been told I was smiling at someone when what I perceived was that I was glancing at a blur. I use eye contact in conversation, when I'm in the conversational groove and have been looking at a face long enough to see every ugly little bloodshot vein in the person's eyes, but I use eye contact sparingly; I've been told the way I make eye contact is more typical of Asians than of Anglo-Americans.

As a young student I remember trying to use heavy eye contact in the way that worked so well for some of my school friends. What I learned right away, in Washington, was that some things work differently for top-heavy women than they do for men or even for bottom-heavy women. My friends' use of eye contact was seen as soulful; mine was seen as sexual. Then when I came home, the people I knew best still perceived heavy eye contact as a hostile display, so I got, "What's the matter? Take your eyes off me." So as an adult I've tended to keep eye contact brief.

I was never mislabelled autistic, but in recent years I've seen friends' children mislabelled in all kinds of grotesque ways. Schools receive extra funds for disabled children, so some money-grubbing school employees want to redefine every "outgoing" child as hyperactive and every nice quiet child as autistic. Here's a free tip for parents: if your child really had an autistic-type disorder, you might have been in denial about the diagnosis, but you would have noticed something wrong before your child was six years old.

If you hear the word "autism" in connection with your child from a school employee, before you've heard it from people who know your child in real life, the first and most important step to take is to remove your child from that school. Then become familiar with the traits that define normal, healthy LBS introversion (here) and high sensory perceptivity (here). (There's also a kind of unhealthy hypersensitivity that's most often caused by fever and/or medications; many people with autism are hypersensitive, but most hypersensitive people are not autistic.) Children who've inherited either of these traits don't need to have any special problems making friends or communicating with other people...unless mislabelling creates problems for them.

Differences between what can be expected of bright, sensitive children and the behavioral symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome are hard to overlook in real life, but can be confused by people who've never observed a real "Aspie." All children have some degree of the definitive autistic-type trait, lack of empathy with others, because real empathy develops only around puberty. Gifted children usually also have another autistic-type trait, lack of close friends at school, because gifted children seldom have the opportunity to meet their real peers before high school or even college. Many children, gifted or otherwise, also do other things associated with Asperger's Syndrome, but lack the obsessive-compulsive element that makes Asperger's Syndrome a disease condition. For example, most children count things when they're learning to count, but "Aspies" count things compulsively and feel that they need to count things to be "safe."

And, of course, autistic children don't make eye contact. I can see this precipitating a false alarm in the families of normal, quiet children with severe astigmatism. Usually astigmatism isn't severe enough to make eye contact impossible, but usually astigmatism does make people feel that the role of eye contact in communication has been overrated to the point of absurdity; for us, eyes are not windows of the soul. If your child talks freely on a variety of subjects, and seems to bond at least with family members and pets, but acts as if eye contact is optional, it's worth checking for other signs of astigmatism.

What do you do if your child does have astigmatism? Well, I'm glad that what my parents did for me, when they realized I had this quirk, was nothing at all. Glasses that wouldn't have damaged my eyes would have been expensive and would probably have had harmful effects on my above-average visual acuity. It's easier to educate people about astigmatism and, when possible, help others realize how easily their eyes can be fooled and how valuable it is to listen to what people say without being distracted by our eyes.