I have been thinking about my eye vision lately. When I was in fourth grade, I noticed that reading the white board became increasingly difficult as the school year went on. I knew that my father wore glasses, but that didn’t raise any red flags because the rest of my family didn’t wear any. That was until my one of my oldest sisters told my parents that she too was having difficultly seeing long distance. I took this as my chance to confess to my parents that my own eye sight was starting to become terrible that I started to squint just to watch television.

When first hearing this, my mother didn’t believe me. She thought that because my older sister was getting glasses, I didn’t want to be left out and get a pair as well. She carried on with this belief until one day, when at a family outing, one of my sisters asked me to read something in the distance. I replied, “I don’t know what I am looking” and of course, everyone thought I was lying. However, my mom noticed that I was squinting my eyes hard and only then did it hit her, I needed to see an ophthalmologist.

Shortly after that incident, I had an appointment and it was there that the three of us (me, my mother and my ophthalmologist) discovered that my eye vision was indeed poor. It was weird at first, wearing glasses. I became hyper-aware of them, I caught myself focusing on the outline of the frames and not seeing the actual lens themselves. Annually, I would found myself sitting at the ophthalmologist and getting a new prescription every time because as I got older, my eye sight gets progressive worse.

This freaked out me, especially since this year I was told that if I don’t switch to contacts or undergo laser eye surgery, there’s a slight probability as I age, my eye vision will worsen to the point where I will be legally become blind. Hearing this was a waking up call for me and my family, there are plans in motion to prevent this from happening and I am grateful that this was caught before it was too late.

Reading Cockeyed by Ryan Knighton was a rather interesting experience for me. Although I am taking precautions prevent my eye sight from worsening, it was unsettling to read about Knighton and him watching himself become blind and not having any options to stop it. It’s annoying when you confide to someone about something serious and as a reaction, he or she initially doesn’t believe you.

Yet, something that really struck with me from Knighton’s memoir would have to be the final sentence in whole autobiography: “I’ve been blind,” I’ll have to say, “for as long as I can remember” (261). I read this as Knighton identifying himself as a blind man, blind being something that wasn’t present for his whole life but arrived and took over it. Although I personally haven’t reached the point where it feels as if my eye condition has consumed a huge portion of my life, I am aware and recognize that once I correct my eye sight, I will feel and be a different Chipo.