Between a video I watched and a vision test I took today, I've been doing some thinking about my eyes. I've had a variety of issues with them throughout my life (nothing serious), one of which is a bit strange, so I figured I'd do a post talking about them.
I am farsighted, technically. I say 'technically' because I can put my hand just over a foot away from my face and focus on it, even without glasses, with only slight discomfort. Anything further than that is effortless, with or without glasses. I don't think this has always been the case, though- when I was younger, I think it was worse, and at one point I even had to wear bifocals (I'm glad this was in the past, it seems headache-inducing now).
More significantly though, I have a lazy eye (namely the right one). It's kinda hard to describe what it's like- it's not that it's blurry, or hard to focus, but if I close my other eye, the darkness seems to overlay on top of the visual input, and it's hard to see much through it. It's a bit like having a dominant hand, really- if I try to write with my right hand, it looks like a child's writing (and if I use my left, it's significantly worse). The same is true of my eyes- if I try to read with the right eye, it's honestly a struggle. As far as I can tell, it's caused by the same thing- namely, an arbitrary preference by my brain. I remember, when I was young, I had an eyepatch over my good eye in an attempt to force my brain to appreciate the other one more. Honestly, I kinda hope this didn't help, cause if it did that would mean my eye was basically useless before the treatment.
There are some interesting side effects of this, though. Firstly, as my eye doctor pointed out to me, being right handed and left eyed makes for a good baseball player. It also means I have to aim guns left-handed, which has caused some confusion for people but isn't an inconvenience for me. There are bad effects too, of course- magic eye posters never work for me, and I feel that 3D movies don't work for me to the full extent (though I'm unsure of this, considering how some of my peers talk about them). I do get depth perception by looking at the relative size of objects, but the true depth perception is somewhat lost on me. On the other hand, a lifetime of primarily using my left eye means it's actually gotten quite good- during a (very inaccurate) test in high school, I found that my left eye had about 20/15 vision, whereas my right was around 20/60. For anyone who doesn't know, that means I can see from 20 feet what most people can from 15 (or from 60 in the latter case, which is pretty rubbish really).
There's one last effect that's more humorous than anything- when I try to cross my eyes, only the right one moves. The left one is too focused on whatever it is I'm looking at. I can manually move it though, but it feels more like just looking away than anything.
Anyways, that's it for today- hopefully you found this post interesting and/or enjoyable! If you've got any similar vision quirks, let me know in the replies!
