#mallory mitchell

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My Color

My Color by Mallory Mitchell “Mallory, what time does the clock on the microwave say?” My mom was starting to sound frustrated now, which doesn’t happen often. “Come on, I know you know how to read the numbers. Come on sweetie.” I do know how to read the numbers, I just can’t see them. I get up from my stool at the kitchen counter to get closer and my mom’s voice stops me. “Baby, what are you doing?” I have to get close to see the numbers I told her. “You can’t see the microwave?” For the next while, I can’t remember how long because I was only two and a half, my parents sat in front of me playing the “how many fingers am I holding up?” game. It’s almost comforting to know I’m not the only one with bad eyesight. My mom and my little brother have worse eyes than I do, so we have learned to cope together; although cope may be the wrong word. When you don’t know anything different you learn to deal with your sight just as everyone learns to walk and talk. Everyone has their different struggles but we learn to handle it in our own ways. When you have a bad eye prescription you have good and bad eye days. Much like a person could have good and bad hair days, they really do affect how your mood is the whole day. One Friday I had a very “bad eye day”. I went into the day wanting it to be a “good eye day”. When you want it to be a “good eye day” you pull out your ridiculously expensive box of brand new contact lenses, in contrast with someone’s ridiculously expensive hair product. This is what I did on Friday. My contacts were getting old and what better way to start the weekend than with a fresh new pair of eyes? My eyes have different prescriptions. My left eye is legally blind, while my right eye is the better of the two, still pretty bad but better, with a stigmatism. A stigmatism sounds scary but it’s really not. All a stigmatism means is that your eye is not perfectly round, and so you have to have a certain pair of contacts to fit your eye. The doctor orders them because they have to place the stigmatism on your contacts where you need it. When I put in my contacts, prepared for a clearer world, I was met with disappointment. My left eye was correct – I was used to my left eye not seeing all that well. But my right eye was all wrong. I could see, but barely. I shoved my index finger into my eye and pushed my contact all around, and then looked in the mirror again. Clear! Blink. Fuzz. Oh no. It’s just this contact. Relax. My first reaction is to stress over things, and I have to consciously tell myself that it’s not the end of the world. I frantically reached for another one of those overpriced little containers and pulled it open, spilling a little of the solution holding my contact. Popping it into my eye, I was met with the same response. Maybe those two are just bad, I hoped, pulling out another container. But no, I was met with the same blurry right eye. You’re going MORE blind, said the stress devil on my one shoulder. No, you just have a tired eye, or at worst you have an eye infection. Just put on your glasses. The rational voice on my other shoulder was much nicer on my nerves, but the devil can be insistent. My mom was faced with the worst case scenario about a year ago. The test to detect her particular problem was just developed a couple of years ago, and it’s very rare. Therefore they can’t really help her without some serious experimentation; serious experimentation that would have to be done on her. Her eyesight is worse than mine already, but they told her that she will probably be completely blind within the next ten years. I guess that’s what scares her too. All of our eyesight is really similar, so who’s to say her rare disease isn’t present in both mine and my brothers’ eyes as well, or will be when we get a little bit older? So with my family’s history in mind and despite my great dislike for them, on went the glasses. Every day I would check my contacts. That’s an understatement. I checked my contacts obsessively. I absolutely hate my glasses. I put them on and I feel like a whole other person. With my contacts in I feel like a pretty cute girl. I feel like I can express myself and present myself in a way that I like, and others respond to. No one knows about my struggle with my eyes unless I tell them. But with my glasses I feel different. There’s a wall between me and the world, and I haven’t, despite how long I’ve worn them, figured out how to break down that self-constructed barrier. My struggle is sitting on my nose where everyone can see. My eyes go different amounts of small because of the prescription, and the lenses stick out of the frames showing off how bad my eyes are. I go to a specialist just to make them less embarrassing. I have spent hours trying on pair after pair of glasses to find the right frames. I always find ones that I would love to wear if I was just wearing them for fashion, which lots of people do nowadays. Those people wouldn’t like to wear them either if they had lenses that made their eyes look distorted and alien-esque. Then I have to take into consideration that they have to be small glasses so that the lenses don’t poke three miles out of them. I never wear my glasses, which I realize is really pathetic for how much I pay for them. But here I was, obsessively checking if my contacts worked again so I could end the torture of wearing my glasses. I fogged up my glasses for a straight week. *** The eye appointment was an interesting one. I made my dad go with me, because I was convinced they were going to tell me I was blind and that there was no way I could drive home. “What if they tell me I’ll be completely blind in a year??” “Oh that won’t happen. Quit being a worry wart. You will be fine.” He knows that worrying is my first inclination, and no matter how much he tells me not to worry I will continue. “Ohhhhhhhhhhh nooooooo…” “What?” “I’m sooo nervous!! What if they tell me I can’t wear contacts anymore? What if they tell me I have to wear glasses my whole life? What if they tell me that I can’t drive? OR WORSE… What if they tell me it’s a psychological disorder and nothing is ACTUALLY wrong and it’s all in my head????” I’ve always had problems with anxiety. Looking back I should have known it was the fault of the eye doctor. I should have known it was just the contacts. They had ordered for the placement of a ten on the stigmatism, when I needed a 110. In my defense though, I wore a contact out of that same box for a couple months before. So I’m not completely crazy. I am just really scared that I’m going to be completely blind one day. I mean, my blind is bad enough but I can at least function and I’ve learned what I can and can’t do. I know that I can find my way around my house without any help from my eyes. I know that I can’t find my way around in the morning anywhere else, so I better have my glasses or contacts near. But what if I couldn’t drive, or see my family, or see the flowers? I just don’t know how I’d deal with that. Ralph Waldo Emerson taught me an important lesson when he said, “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting -- a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.” Instead of worrying what I would do if the worst happened, I must enjoy my life, and appreciate my sight and all that I have. I must realize that everyone is fighting their own battle. *** As much as my mom has suffered in relationship to her eyes she feels the same as I do. When you are born with something you adapt. When you are handed a challenge you fight to make the best of it. You figure out how to cope with what they like to call a disability. But I’m not sure how it’s a disability if it’s not disabling, when I haven’t known anything different. This idea has probably been made the most public by the Deaf community and their refusal to support Cochlear implants in born-deaf children. Glenn Hladek of the University of Montana wrote an article titled, Cochlear Implants, the Deaf Culture, and Ethics, and in it he explains, “Members of the Deaf culture celebrate their deafness, and many, if given the opportunity to hear, would choose to remain deaf because they do not see deafness as a disease or a disability, only as a difference.” I am not deaf, and do not understand the Deaf culture but the same idea can go for any difference. I know the world how I am able to see it. They say I’m color blind, but I can see my version of color. Just as Anais Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” This isn’t just because I have bad eyesight. We all see things through the lens of our own experience. I don’t know what everyone else is seeing, but I can see Mallory’s world in Mallory’s color. “Just read me the smallest line you can see.” Oh dear. Here we go. “UUhhhh, A… E… K…” “Can you tell me anything below that?” “Well, let’s see. I… K, L…” “Okay. Let’s try something else.” That was the doctor’s way of saying I wasn’t doing well. We went on with the appointment just like we always did. Dr. Alder has always been my opthalmologist, so he has known me since I was just a little twiglet. He knew reading those stupid charts gave me anxiety. What good are the charts anyway? When I was little and Dr. Alder would leave the room I’d turn around and memorize the letters anyway. He’d come back in and be amazed at how quickly my eyes had improved, in a miraculous five minutes. Then he’d change that slide and we were back to square one with me stammering over every letter. Needless to say, that trick didn’t last long. But that was only one of my ways to try and trick the system. I was and still am a master squinter. I can squint with the best of ‘em. Talk about a change in prescription. I’m pretty sure I have close to perfect vision when I squint. My squinting has gotten me into trouble though. Everyone just thought I was rude in middle school and high school – glaring at everyone. This was when we thought everyone cared about us and what we were doing. When I didn’t realize that the world didn’t revolve around me. I was so “mean” because I would just stare everyone down. Heck, I was just trying to see them! At this age everyone is just lost in their own insecure thoughts, and my eyes helped me realize this. I still have anxiety when I go to places alone, because I have a hard time finding things, or people when I go alone. And then I’m always worried about how stupid I look, wandering around a store or a sporting event looking for what I am desperately trying to find. We don’t think about anyone else unless we’re thinking of how they think about US, which isn’t how it should be. Most the time people aren’t thinking about us. We’re all just trying to get through the day, and I got through mine by squinting through the crowd. I was either glowering at them or checking them out, according to them. For instance: my boyfriend. Adam is six years older than me. He grew up in my neighborhood and we attended the same church for a period of time. To be honest, I had no idea who he was. Sure I’d seen him around but at the time I was too young to even look at him. Well, according to him, I checked him out A LOT. This is honestly, from the bottom of my heart, not true. I am sure that I stared at him. I am sure that I was trying to see everyone and I maybe looked his direction too long. But I did not check him out. Of course, I go along with it. I guess it makes for a better romance story, but if we are talking fact, it just isn’t true- or I just wasn’t aware. It makes people I’m with uncomfortable too. They say I have a staring problem and I guess I could own up to that. It’s just that one glance is not enough time for my eyes to focus, and sometimes I’m curious. Or maybe it’s that I get caught in my own thoughts, and I can’t see anything anyway so there’s nothing to distract me from my politically incorrect actions. I was on a first date. It wouldn’t turn into anything because of this happenstance. We were sitting at dinner in a dimly lit restaurant. Our waiter comes out, and I kid you not, I could not tell if this person was a man or a woman. It was definitely trying to be a woman so we’ll go with her preference. She is loud, and she is proud. She wants everyone to see her, and she wants everyone to stare. So I did. I mean, not on purpose, but I’m not going to argue with my date when he ferociously whispers, “Mallory, you’re staring. You really need to stop, it’s rude.” Sometimes we have to learn to handle things in our life in ways that others don’t understand, because they have not dealt with them themselves. We adapt to our situations and each have our personal struggles. I had to learn how to deal with my eyesight, but everyone has their disability or imperfection that isn’t really an imperfection at all – it’s part of us. I stare at people, I memorize alphabet charts, and I get up to look really close at the time on the microwave. These are all things that make me who I am. The most important thing is despite our personal challenges we learn to appreciate the world around us, and see the beauty of life, rather than let things weigh us down. For most people there comes a point in our lives that we realize that the world and all its happenings do not revolve around us, and each person is fighting their own fight, and seeing the world through their eyes, in their color.

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