the differences we see & feel: on being one-eyed, female & Black

If you ever get the opportunity to speak candidly with folks who endure “Othering”, a term coined by the Black studies scholar john a. powell, you’ll begin to recognize a common thread: people have many judgments about things they have no lived experience of, and oftentimes, these same people are the most shameless about proclaiming said opinions.

As Black people, we are intimately familiar with this concept. No matter which sociopolitical reality you experience, if you are Black, you are most likely acutely aware of the feeling of being different from those around you, simply because of your self-presentation.

If you are Black and queer, you’ve experienced it.

And if you are Black and disabled, well, the same goes for you, too. 

The word “disabled” never resonated with me. Even as a little girl, it was always my prayer that the thing about me that made me different just made me cool, not weird or strange or unapproachable or unlovable.

Because that’s what we’re saying when we introduce this idea of “othering” into our personal and collective lexicons: that somewhere, deep down, the thing that makes you different makes you unworthy of love, so much so that others will find ways to peel your beauty off of you like a sticky film to be washed away and never mentioned of again. 

It’s my right as an alternatively-abled person to be able to choose how I describe my abilities and sense of self. If you grew up with something that made you different from most of the people around you, you have that right, too. 

In my case, being alternatively-abled means that I was born with congenital anophthalmia, a fancy term for being born with only one eye. At the time of my birth, only my right eye had grown in its socket. The left socket was empty. 

The medical community often interchanges the terms “anophthalmia” and “microphthalmia”, although there are distinctions between the two. People with anophthalmia experience no growth of the eye in the eye socket, whereas those with microphthalmia typically have a very small eye in one or both sockets. In more severe cases, people with microphthalmia may appear to have no eye at all, even if there are remnants of eye tissue in the socket. 

Anophthalmia occurs in approximately 780 children annually in the United States. There are several potential causes, most of which point to monogenic or chromosomal mutations. There has also been research which supports certain environmental factors, such as vitamin A deficiency, as potential risk-factors. Given the complexity of fetal development during pregnancy, research continues to develop in this area. 

In my case, doctors aren’t quite sure why I came out this way, but here I am, out here, existing. I wear a prosthetic eye, made from medical-grade acrylic plastic, that fantastically mimics the exact look of my seeing eye. My ocularist, a type of doctor responsible for crafting prosthetic eyes, is an honest-to-God wizard that flawlessly blends science, medicine and art to create living masterpieces. 

Things like this make me believe in magic.  

With that being said, the road to self-acceptance has been long and tenuous. For all the triumphs, there have been many, many tribulations. Growing up, I underwent multiple reconstructive surgeries to ensure that my eye socket could even accept a prosthesis. The alternative to such surgeries is a sort of hope-for-the-best prognosis; given how quickly kids’ faces and bodies develop and change during the early formative years, it’s highly possible that someone with anophthalmia who doesn’t or can’t elect to surgery will experience facial development that may permanently prevent them from being able to wear a prosthesis. In other words, a child’s facial bones can grow so quickly that any future reconstructive surgery may no longer be an effective solution. This is why early intervention is critical, should the person want to have the option of wearing a prosthetic eye. This is also why urgent discussions of medical discrimination and racism are particularly relevant: if a doctor hasn’t worked with many - or any - children and families of color, and doesn’t have the cultural competency or empathetic muscle to understand their circumstances, what happens to that child? There is so much more at stake here than simply finding the most technically-skilled surgeon to intervene.

Recovery from reconstructive surgeries can be painful and unexpectedly drawn out. 

Sometimes they don't go exactly according to plan, or need to happen quickly, as was the case when my lower eyelid spontaneously disconnected from the upper, causing my prosthesis to fall out onto the polished hardwood floors of my parents’ living room. I was nine years old. 

I went to school the next day wearing a black polyester pirate’s eye patch under the strict guidance of my ophthalmologist (that part was a bit thrilling, I admit). He had me wear the patch for several days until there was a slot in his schedule to perform the repair surgery. The kids at school had a field day, as you can imagine. I tried my best to keep it together, but how can you hide from yourself when you’ve got on a black polyester pirate’s eye patch around a bunch of fifth graders? 

All things considered, the incident wasn’t too bad, at least physically: my (very expensive and not covered by American health insurance, in case you were wondering) eye didn’t shatter upon clattering onto the floor, and the surgery went successfully, as expected. 

Emotionally, though, my outlook was more bleak; any delusions of coolness or self-preservation I might’ve harbored in my little nine-year-old gut had vanished into thin air. I was That Black Girl With The Weird Eye, And Yes She’s Intelligent And Articulate But What’s Wrong With Her Eye??

Thus began intimate cycles of self-loathing, of retreating into myself. 

The eventual, thorny puberty years highlighted a truth I had long suspected: looks matter more than anything else, and therefore the entirety of my worth depended upon acceptance by kids who had never met anyone with one eye, let alone someone like me, a suburban girl raised in the 90s by older parents who had survived late Jim Crow-era segregation, with natural hair and glasses and a penchant for *NSync and Leonardo DiCaprio. 

____

The Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law in 1990, defines a disabled person as "a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment."

I think the ADA’s definition of a disabled person is fascinating, especially the last bit: “A person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment”. In a culture where perception, oftentimes at the expense of reality, predicates so much of our personal and professional success, other peoples’ opinions become a decidedly slippery slope to navigate.

My truth is that I'm able to perform pretty much all the tasks I need and want to throughout my daily life. This means I can drive a car (yes, really), work full-time, get a graduate degree, go to the gym and lift weights, swim in the ocean, watch movies, read Tarot cards, make friends, flirt, fuck, wear eye makeup, retweet wholesome memes, and other things. I don't say that to brag, or to make me feel better about myself (although truth be told, I'm always trying to do the latter in some form or another, as a #CarefreeBlackGirlWhoGotThisWayViaTherapyAndCopingStrategies). I also had the good fortune to be born into a loving middle-class family with the means to support my medical needs, and the access to people and resources who could help when we couldn’t help ourselves. For that, and for many other reasons, I am grateful. 

As my physical appearance has matured over the years and modern medicine continues to advance, the pointed questions, sideways glances and nosy-but-well-meaning folks’ opinions have generally diminished. My prosthesis has gracefully adapted to my facial structure after countless ophthalmologist visits, surgical interventions, and hours in the ocularist’s chair. 

The emotional wounds sting less, as they are wont to do by the grace of time and spirit. I consciously surround myself with people who love me for who and how I am, who see and believe in my beauty, both physical and fundamental, and who recognize me as a treasure rather than an inconvenience. 

My family, too, supports me in all that I do. I doubt I could be as functional and outward-facing as I am had it not been for their early support. Despite the trappings of our image-obsessed, front-facing camera-ready society, they buoy me in ways spoken and unspoken. And my fiance puts me on a pedestal, no cap - he encourages me to understand that I am beautiful because of my eye, not in spite of it. 

It feels good to be here. Even if being here comes with its own set of complications. 

It’s simplistic to say that as humans, we must search internally for our own sense of validation and understanding, and to avoid seeking ourselves outside of ourselves. This is especially relevant in the Buddhist tradition, and other ancient spiritual practices. I began studying these practices for this precise reason; I wanted to understand my condition in a way that was central to my own experience, and not solely in contrast with how the world may or may not see me. 

But the more I learn about myself and my place here on the physical plane, I wrestle with the idea that I am not stuck in a vacuum; people see and hear me, and I do the same for them. We can’t seek ourselves outside of ourselves, but sometimes in order to get there, inputs that challenge what we think we know come into play. The work is internal, but the external experiences can help - most often in the form of psychological triggers that spur us into real healing and self-actualization.

My “disability” is a part of my identity I continually work to come to terms with. Like my Blackness, and my femininity, it is part of my self-presentation; something I can’t erase. I wouldn’t want to, either. 

And now, being age 29, during a time which at present feels like a reckoning of all the years that came before it, the urgency to share my story shines through, pressing up against my back, gently nudging me toward the open door of unabashed personal expression. 

__

The other morning, I went to go grab breakfast from one of my favorite local places, face covered in the requisite mask, hands recently cleansed by the contents of my travel hand sanitizer. My usual guy saw me enter, his eyes crinkling at the edges to tell me that there was a smile underneath the fabric on his face. He was accompanied by someone new, someone I didn’t recognize - his nine-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter, who I presumed were serving as dad’s helpers for the day. His son greeted me with a warm hello, holding up my bag of food as he spoke. I took my sunglasses off and reached in my bag for my wallet, and as I did so, little gasps erupted from the children. 

“What happened to your eye?” the boy exclaimed, a mixture of concern and intense curiosity in his voice. 

“Yeah, what happened!” the girl’s voice echoed excitedly. “Why does one of your eyes look like it’s pointing down and the other one is looking straight ahead?”

I finished paying and put my wallet away, the thoughts whirring in my head about the best way to answer the question. I paused and smiled. 

“Well, I was born with one eye. My left eye is a pretend copy of my right eye. I can only see out of the right eye.” 

If only you could have seen the look on their faces. 

“That’s possible??” the boy blurted out, a huge grin on his face as he bounced up and down. “That’s so cool!” 

Meanwhile, the little girl glanced at me skeptically. 

“Well, I have TWO eyes, you know”, she quipped. 

I told her that both of her eyes were beautiful, and that people are made differently. Some people have two eyes, and other people have one. 

She seemed satisfied enough with that answer and left, skipping to the back of the shop. 

Food in hand, I smiled, said goodbye and walked out of the door. 

breaking free of "why"

“Why am I feeling like this?

“Why do I feel so horrible?”

“Everyone around me seems to be coping with issues just fine. Why does it seem like I’m not doing as well as they are?” 

“Why am I so behind?”

“What am I doing wrong? I try so hard to feel good by doing what I’m told is the right thing - meditation, rest, clean eating, moving my body in uplifting ways - but end up feeling like shit instead.”

Do these questions sound familiar? 

To me, they do. It’s so easy to obsess over asking myself “why” when I’m feeling upset, drained, bored, confused, frustrated, or any other mess of negative emotions. The soul-level transitions of 2020, and now the ongoing work of building new paradigms, brings with it opportunities to become more intimately familiar with these feelings than ever before.

These feelings have a tendency to become reflexive, instinctual. I get caught in a web of questioning the negative feelings that sit in the pit of my stomach, just as quickly as the feelings appear. 

There is an intense burning inside of me that believes that if I can just understand WHY I am feeling the way that I do, then I can solve the issue and release my suffering. I can get “back on track” and understand the problem, thereby avoiding it again in the future. 

I used to believe that this worked. But then it all started to unravel, and even when I’d follow the process of asking myself why, and come up with answers that I thought were sufficient, I’d still fail to relieve my suffering and end back up in the same place I was when I started. Sometimes this process was instantaneous; other times, I’d convince myself I was fine, at least for a little while. Eventually, though, the negative feelings would creep back in, and things would go back to how they were. 

After repeating this cycle over and over, stumbling along the way, here is what I am ready to understand: 

The ego seeks understanding. The soul seeks, and is, love.

What do I mean by this? 

The ego is ready to go to war for things it cannot understand in basic, simple terms. It seeks answers to questions that cannot be answered plainly, validation for feelings that do not need to be coddled, and resistance to things that are new and unknown. 

The ego exerts itself through an insatiable need to know on an intellectual level. This has nothing to do with the felt sense of the body. The ego thinks, “if I can just know the answer to this problem I am having, then I can control it, and by controlling it, I can feel safe. All I need is to feel safe, and then I can be free.”

The ego is responsible for upholding what soul-level astrologers Mark Borax and Marcella Eversole call “the Trance of Normalcy”. The ego within all of us has a hard time understanding that it is not truly in control, because most of us are taught that the ego is the critical, and most central, point of contact between ourselves and the world we live in. We are taught that it’s the ego that makes the decisions, seeks the recognition, gets the accolades, and creates our success. 

How does this show up in practical ways? For me, it can look like: 

• Comparing myself to people I know (and people I don’t)

• Doing things that don’t feel aligned just because someone told me I “should”, or because there has been an expectation of certain behavior from family, friends, and/or society

• Repeatedly working until I am physically and emotionally overwhelmed and exhausted

• Placing an emphasis on my external achievements and believing that my worth is defined by them

• Overly rigid and binary thinking (this is right, that is wrong, and there is no in-between)

• Abusing my personal boundaries by saying yes to things I don’t want to say yes to

• Abusing my personal boundaries by ignoring how I really feel just to “get along” 

• Fear of being vulnerable, even around people I trust

The soul inherently counters this notion of absolute control. Esther and Abraham Hicks are an amazing source of guidance on the subject. The soul understands that having the “right answer” is not what will solve the perceived problem. In fact, the soul knows that there is no specific “right answer”, only an infinite number of paths to various destinations, some of which will lead us to places of joy, and others which will lead us to places that do not serve our most aching wishes. The soul wants us to know that we cannot make a “wrong” decision; there is no such thing. The soul is always working to realign us with our most true, most divine wishes, dreams, and desires. The soul understands that the only way to emancipate ourselves from the feelings keeping us down is to accept. That’s it. Accept them, feel them, experience them for what they are, without judgement or shaming. Once we accept, we can divert our energy to spaces aligned with what generates the most happiness and joy for us internally.

And so today, I sit and I write and I share this with you.  

I am learning to break free of pestering myself with questions of “why”. Why I fall into believing I’m not good enough, why time seems to be moving both more slowly and quickly these days, why I have trouble letting go of certain patterns in my life, why things in my past have happened that didn’t make sense to me then, and still stand to confuse me now. These are all pieces of my ego that yearn to be noticed. Instead of growing more and more frustrated that I can’t always answer these questions, or the answers I come up with seem insufficient, I turn to letting go. 

I turn to accepting the emotions for what they are - fear, anxiety, frustration, loneliness, sadness. They are all valid and I am no less worthy for feeling them. 

The next time I am tempted to ask myself “why” I feel a certain way, I will take a deep breath in through my nose, exhale fluidly through my mouth, and just be with what comes up. I am learning that in the moment after, there is truth, and there is love. 

I am grateful. 

digital (and spiritual) self-preservation in a Covid-19 world

Over the past several months, some of my social connections have struggled. Or, should I say, my perception of how social mores have changed has… well, changed. I know I am not alone in this. Covid-19 has had a way of reflecting back on us the things that are both important and more inconsequential now.

My inner critic has started to ask (or rather, demand) why my inclination toward virtual gatherings and socially-distanced hangouts have begun to slowly whittle into dust. At first, my brain accepted the excuses I’d give it. But, as time went on, I found myself in a confusing flurry of mixed emotions -  anger, frustration, boredom that feels like a slow, painful torture, loneliness, apathy, sadness, depression. 

But, as the laws of duality tell us, it’s not all darkness and shadow work. There are more positive emotions present here, too - things like deep, exalted relief from the constructs of unrelenting capitalism, and bubbling gratitude for more rest and time to myself. 

These are the areas I’m focusing on and working through, but admittedly, it is hard. 

There are parts of me that feel a deep sense of ennui about sharing mundane parts of my life this year online - “normally” (and I use that word lightly, because “normal” is a construct), I have fewer qualms about sharing pictures of food I made, or a song I listened to, or a mirror shot I took because my solar plexus felt strong and the feelings of confidence were high. 

But I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that so much of this sharing, some of which exists in the spirit of true connection, and some of which, if I’m being honest, is part of a need to participate in a sort of performative hand-holding, has felt empty. 

And more emptiness, in a year which already has felt so empty, especially as a Black woman, just stings. 

I haven’t forgotten to mention the racialized virtue signaling on social media and other online channels that has come - and gone - with such a fervor that it’s hard to wrap my head around. 

Am I less of an activist if I don’t talk about #JusticeforBreonna online as much as the next person? Is my existence dependent upon educating others about the Black community’s stance on racial justice under our current presidential administration? Am I less of a Black woman if I’m tired of explaining myself? 

Maybe this post is in itself a form of virtue signaling. Maybe I’m just as eager to fill the emptiness with connection in the only way I really know how - bleeding my words onto the page, until I’ve exhausted myself, in the hopes that it resonates with someone else, in some small way. 

Whatever the case may be, I think it’s important to call attention to how and where we practice self-preservation in our online spaces, especially now, when so much of our identities and livelihoods are tied to our internet connections. Connecting in real life now is a decidedly novel experience - it won’t be that way forever, but for so many of us, it’s a reality our souls have chosen to live in during this particular cosmic timeline. 

What do I mean by self-preservation? Well, ideally, I want to live in a space of balance when it comes to my online interactions - a space in which I’m freely and openly exchanging ideas, knowledge, vulnerability and humor with others while maintaining a sense of privacy and connectedness with the personal parts of me, the quiet parts of me. I still belong to the school of thought that some posts are meant to stay in the drafts. 

As that balance is achieved, I am working through it. Working through self-doubt that tells me my ideas aren’t strong enough to breathe fresh air on their own; working through the self-flagellation buoyed by the narrative that Black people must always be twice as good and work twice as hard to get half as far; working through reminders that the systems we relied on are no longer working, and never really worked that well for us from the start.

I pray we find the balance we seek, in ways that feel good and whole. 

Reflection

How do I strike a balance between my online life and my IRLife? 

Are there parts of me that feel overly exposed, or not open enough?