One of the beautiful things about blogging and sharing one’s thoughts and photos with a larger community is the opportunity it creates for seeing through another’s eyes.

So I decided the other night, as I sat in my little studio apartment, that I would show you what I see.

Literally.

I have horrible eyesight. Horrible.

When I was about 12, I started to notice my vision lacked clarity, sharpness. I couldn’t read the same distant signs that my siblings could. I had to squint to distinguish the world.

I eventually got glasses, then contact lenses, and was in awe at all the details I had been missing.

If you’re not likewise visually-impaired, it can be hard to understand what I’m talking about.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten the “how many fingers am I holding up?” response when I first divulge my relative blindness. I won’t tell you how many times I’ve run into signs.

Or poles.

Or walls.

(Now seems an appropriate time to say – for the record – I’ve never caused, nor been in, a car accident. All this running into things has always occurred while I simply walk about. Although, that’s pretty alarming too…)

So folks, here you have it. Rather than try to describe the blurriness that ensues upon de-lensing my eyeballs, I shall show you.

Siblings, take note!

Now you see it….

…now you don’t.

This is a pretty accurate representation of what I see when I have no visual aid (achieved by manually “focusing” my camera). I shot this while sitting on my bed, so am probably about 10 feet from the door.

It’s like a fun house with goofy mirrors!

A few years ago I had an optometrist explain it this way. Then (and it’s almost certainly declined since then), I had 20/100 vision. What this means is, if someone with 20/20 vision is standing 100 feet away from a street sign, I would have to be 20 feet away from that sign to achieve the same amount of visual clarity.

The first time I went to an eye doctor, my mother’s jaw actually dropped when I was asked to read the top lines off that standard eye test (you know the one – random letters printed in decreasing size).

And it wasn’t because I aced that sucker.

What’s really fun is that while I’m nearsighted (the inability to see things far away; counter-intuitive, I know), my mother is farsighted (meaning she needs reading glasses for menus and such). We make a fun little comedic pair when we try to read anything together, the back of a food carton for instance.

She’ll thrust it as far away from her face as possible, stretching her arm out (or better yet, have one of my siblings hold it a few feet away), and I’ll have to wrestle it closer to my face if I have any hope of making sense of the blurs.

“Who’s on first?“