I was just out for a walk in my neighborhood, looking around, astonished with delight in the knowledge that this is actually going to happen. It is happening. After all of this time.
This week I have seen a tremendous quantum leap in vision quality in all aspects of vision: looking around, noticing that I'm able to get distant double images to overlap. This is new. But then I look down at my hands, and again: single. Look back off into the distance. I'm able to instantly adjust, almost without thinking, and look up and off into the distance without visual conflict.
I find my mind flooding with thoughts about what's possible with the human mind: what ordinary people can do if they mold their minds with deliberation and purpose: purposefully leveraging their neuroplasticity in order to maximize potential and achieve self-actualization. I'm coming to believe that ordinary people are capable of doing crazy things. It's just that they typically don't.
It is a really weird aspect of this universe that we live in: that ramps are everywhere. That I can go from being born, living my entire life, effectively half-blind, to fully developing my binocular vision at the age of 37 after 11 years of continuous work.
I have distant, faint memories of being a child (probably 3-4 years old), looking up into the sky, and noticing a weak fleeting double image of clouds that were separate from my main vision. It would be decades later that I would understand what I was seeing. Those faint images was the input from my suppressing eye. As a child, my suppression was so complete, that I barely ever noticed double vision. My brain adapted extremely well to strabismus. It nearly entirely shut off the lazy eye's input.
Only later, when I was 22, would I open a New Scientist magazine and read an article about Susan Barry's story and suddenly apprehend how my vision was different from everyone else's. I learned about her story, and how it matched up with mine, entirely. She was born cross-eyed, had three childhood surgeries in order to straighten them out. The surgery, in both our cases, did mostly straighten out the eyes, but did not result in binocular vision. Then later, at the age of 50, she did vision therapy for a year and quickly gained full binocular vision. She then wrote a book about her story, Fixing My Gaze, which inspired many people, including yours truly.
I thought to myself 'man, I'm going to have to do that someday when I have the money in order to get a vision therapist.'. So vision therapy was put on hold for five years until I had a job which allowed me to afford a vision therapist. I was 27. Many things have happened from then to now. I had a vision therapist for about a year. I stopped, because it was too expensive (though I continued vision therapy on my own). I started this blog. I got involved with various vision therapy groups on the Internet, got to know lots of people, and learned a lot of their stories. I learned a lot about the visual system. I bought a ColorBoy (light tube for Syntonics) from Belgium (which I recently gave to someone in Scotland). I got to meet and know James Blaha and Tuan Tran (creators of Vivid Vision--vision training software made for virtual reality headsets). I did vision therapy exercises with a rudimentary Oculus Rift developer kit while dripping with saline from cathodes carefully placed on my occipital lobes. I certainly did a lot of risky, crazy shit. But that's me. Life is too short to not take risks and do interesting things.
Vision therapy has been an incredibly long, interesting, time-consuming, and pain-in-the ass ramp. When spending 45 minutes a day doing vision therapy sessions, and hundreds of hours a year doing vision therapy (I've probably logged several thousands of hours), I kept thinking to myself 'I am really unusual to be able to spend so much time and effort in doing this. Anyone else would have given up a long time ago, or even have the attention span or temperament to do vision therapy to begin with.'.
But the reality is, is while vision therapy was indeed a giant pain in the ass, I also kind of enjoyed it. A lot. I am indeed an unusual person. I have no problems with admitting that. I've had a girlfriend once tell me that. She said 'You're a really unusual person. That's both a good thing, and a bad thing.'. Heh. I was, frankly, fascinated by my visual system, and by learning about it, experiencing it firsthand, staring into the double-imaged circles of the light tube for 45 minutes at a time. I enjoyed looking at the finger monster switching from my dominant eye, over to the suppressing eye, and noticing how it would escape my attention when it moved right in front of my suppressing eye. I am a naturally curious person, and this, no doubt, worked to my advantage.
It turns out that I do have an unusual ability to force myself to do boring, painful, and unpleasant things for long periods of time, if I successfully convinced myself that it will be worth it in the end. I can chew through walls if I've convinced myself that it's worth it. Well, it turns out that I was right. I'm not done yet. But it's already been worth it, and it will be even more worth it once I'm able to resolve hidden auto-stereograms, which may be very soon.
I never gave up. At no point during those 11 years was giving up on the table. Why didn't I give up?
Well, it's not because I'm a badass or anything. Really, it's because I saw steady improvement, basically that entire time. I was just focused on improving every day. I've given up on virtually everything I've pursued in life. Karate (as a kid), baseball (understandable, given my vision condition), roofing, every job I've had until now. Granted, I never really gave a shit about those things. Some things worth giving up on. The key is in being able to distinguish between those things.
But as said, vision therapy was a bit different, because there was never a reason to stop improving. Also I just had/have an extreme desire to have a visual system that works as it's supposed to. I'm still pretty young, but if I can have vision that works properly and enjoy having that vision for another 40 or 50 years, then it's worth working my ass off to develop it. It might be a different story if I were 70 years old, working to develop a visual system I might have for another 5-10 years. And if I can still enjoy life a bit while working towards this goal, then that's great too.
“Never give up on something that you can't go a day without thinking about.”--Winston Churchill.
I guess Winston would approve of my persistence with this. There was never a day during those 11 years, or even hardly a moment, that I didn't think about my vision: where it wasn't near the top of my attention. Now the journey is finally reaching its terminus, the culmination of all of those years of effort and toil is finally arriving. Yeah, you can say emotions are running high.
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